


In Fire

by dehautdesert



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Silent Hill Fusion, Anakin Skywalker-centric, Gore, Human Disaster Anakin Skywalker, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Inspired by Silent Hill 2, M/M, Mind Rape, Monsters, No Beta We Die Like Clones, Psychological Horror, Slow Burn, Survival Horror, dark themes, enter at your own risk
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:53:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 19
Words: 155,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27315100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dehautdesert/pseuds/dehautdesert
Summary: When Darth Maul escapes from custody on Mandalore, Anakin and Obi-Wan race straight from their recent victory to attempt to intercept him, resulting in a firefight over a mysterious planet and both their vessels crashing outside of a town the local authorities dare not go near.With Obi-Wan gravely injured in the fight, Anakin must venture into the settlement alone to search for parts to repair their ship. But this town, it appears, was once a Sith stronghold, and the longer Anakin spends there the more it twists into a world of someone's nightmarish delusions brought to life. Monsters roam the streets, great chasms line the roads and more than half the doors he tries are locked. His only allies are a mysterious boy who was stranded here searching for his father...... and Obi-Wan?
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 298
Kudos: 170





	1. Dark Things

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween, my friends. Welcome to my Star Wars - Silent Hill 2 fusion fanfic extravaganza! 
> 
> A few quick (hopefully) notes before we begin.
> 
> 1\. You do not have to be familiar with Silent Hill 2 or the Silent Hill series in general to read this. Furthermore, while there will definitely be Easter eggs a-plenty for those who do know the series, this will not be a play-for-play of the game except with Anakin instead of James, but rather will follow the course of the game more roughly - giving SH fans something to look forward to in terms of the mystery, I hope.
> 
> As for Star Wars, this takes place in an imaginary timeline where Maul escaped custody shortly after the death of Dooku, and our favourite pair have delayed the action of ROTS to try and retrieve him.
> 
> 2\. This will be a post-as-you-go NaNoWriMo project: only a quarter of expected chapters have been written so far, but I have high hopes for finishing it by the end of the year thanks to NaNo. I am expecting it to reach 150k+ though, so be warned. Very slow burn with this one.
> 
> 3\. When the tags say Enter At Your Own Risk, they mean it. I prefer to put blanket warnings on this one rather than tagging specifics, and if that puts you off... you're probably right to be put off. 
> 
> But, if you like seeing Anakin suffer as much as I do, then this is definitely the story for you! All questions and comments are welcome. Now, I hope you all enjoy this horrible, horrible work of fanfic! :D

*~*~*~*

As he came out of hyperspace, Anakin was greeted with the gut-twisting sight of Obi-Wan’s fighter spinning out of control – one wing half torn away, the ring in pieces.

“Damn it,” he growled. “Obi-Wan!”

There was no answer on the comm. Out of the corner of his eye Anakin registered that the scanner had found the ship Maul had escaped Mandalore on and determined it too had been damaged, but he had already steered his own ship off after Obi-Wan, reaching out in the Force to try and get a grip on the situation, and how to go forward.

The Force screamed danger back at him, but the bond he had clung onto throughout the war had not snapped. Obi-Wan’s comm system had been damaged – he told himself – that was all. His Master was still alive, and would be just as alive when the day was out.

“I’m taking us after him, Jesse – keep an eye out for Maul!”

“Sir!” Jesse acknowledged behind him. “Looks like he’s headed for one of the planets in the system – we should be all right.”

Anakin took a closer scan of the fighter. Maul had gotten a good shot along the rear engine as well as having taken off the wing; the latter he shouldn’t have been able to do unless the craft had already been damaged when Obi-Wan had jumped inside it. Had he not checked? Or, given it was Maul, had he not cared?

 _He didn’t check,_ Anakin thought, and knew he was right. _It’s not like he’s the type to let his emotions cloud his judgement, after all. Or maybe he did and just decided it was worth the risk. Which it would have been, if I had been the one in the fighter and he had taken the transport – like he fucking should have!_

“Sir, I’m only picking up one life sign.”

Jesse had paused, however briefly, before telling him that. Anakin could tell. But he was able to assure him –

“Obi-Wan.”

Not that that was much reassurance for Silver, who had taken point as Obi-Wan’s gunner. The fighter’s defences were down and Maul must have gotten a lucky shot through the gunner’s compartment when they’d started to spin off, maybe a split second before Anakin had come out of hyperspace. Poor Silver. No time to dwell on it now.

“I’m going to bring us ahead and deploy the cables!” Anakin yelled so Sundog, who was in the next compartment trying to keep the hyperdrive from exploding – could hear him too. They must have been in luck with that drive, because Sundog poked his head around the door to nod before heading to the hatch for the lower level, wobbling slightly as Anakin made a sharp turn.

“Will we be all right at this speed, sir?” Jesse asked.

That was pretty much clone-speak for ‘ _we are sure to all die horrible fiery deaths if you try that, sir!_ ’

“I’m going to try and slow it with the Force,” he told him.

That might also have been reassuring, assuming Jesse was yet unaware of the expected limitations of Force-use. Though his helmet was firmly in place, judging by the way he cringed that wasn’t the case. But even then, Anakin could almost make his lip curl into a smirk. Master Yoda could lift small spacecraft without blinking. If Anakin was the Chosen One, stopping a fighter from spinning out of control should have been no problem.

Obi-Wan was in the fighter, after all, and he wasn’t going to let Obi-Wan die. Not when Anakin was right there. Not because of Maul.

He eased the transport into the same trajectory as the fighter without bothering to consult the navi-comp, letting his instinct guide him as he had a hundred times before. There was nothing hard about the controls of a ship, of any ship, no question as to whether he was following the right path. He was alive, and if he was wrong it would likely be over too quick for him to realise it. So everything was all right.

In the Force he could find Obi-Wan’s presence easily. There was a sharp, sympathetic pain along the side of his skull as he picked him out of the swathes of empty void, but physical pain was easily released into the Force, and Anakin brought himself alongside the fighter. He could feel it too, encasing Obi-Wan’s presence – a disturbance in the space around it. As his masters had always said – size mattered not, up to a point, but momentum was going to be tricky to handle.

And the Force warned him of something unstable, in the craft. Push or pull too hard in the wrong place and the main engine would tip over into collapse, possibly killing all of them.

 _Gently, then,_ Anakin told himself. _Make sure I don’t bash you about any more than you already have been, Master. Nice and gentle, and all together…_

Stretching his mind out, Anakin took hold of the fighter and flew with it. He pulled back with the lightest of pressure, decreasing the speed of the transport the same degree as the fighter was slowed, inch by meticulous inch. It was harder with both hands on the controls; the illusion that the movement of the hand affected the movement of objects a Jedi had taken hold of in the Force was powerful, but in the end it was only an illusion.

“Fighter’s speed is decreasing,” Jesse announced with a disbelieving laugh. “A little more should do it, sir.”

“Sundog,” Anakin called, “are you ready with the cables?”

“Ready, sir!” was the answer on the comm.

“Steady does it,” said Jesse. “We should reach optimal deceleration in ten…”

“On my mark, Sundog…”

“Nine…”

There was something strange going on, however. A tricky manoeuvre in the Force, especially an untested one, was always in danger of putting a certain amount of strain on even a Master, and certainly Anakin had felt such strain before, but this…

“Eight…”

Something was different about this feeling. Something not quite painful, but uncomfortable in a way that threatened to break his concentration. Like something was… tearing apart. Becoming untethered, somewhere inside him.

“Seven…”

 _Push through it,_ he told himself. _Push through it or Obi-Wan dies. What does it matter if it damages you somehow? You can take a few knocks for his sake, can’t you?_

The wrenching of his heart at the idea of leaving Obi-Wan to die on the _Invisible Hand_ was still fresh in Anakin’s memory.

_This’ll just be another one you owe me, Master._

“Six…”

He didn’t think it was that serious anyway. And with only a few seconds more to keep pushing…

“Ready…”

“Five…”

The feeling was suddenly much colder, like an ice burn.

_Push through. You’re the Chosen One. You have to be able to do something as simple as this!_

And yet, even with his attention fully focused on matching the speeds of the fighter and transport…

“Four…”

… was it something from outside the ship? But Jesse should have noticed if…

“Three…”

It didn’t matter. As long as he saved Obi-Wan here and now, he could worry about this other feeling later. This… uncanny…

“Two…”

… burning…

… was it really something he hadn’t felt before?

“One…”

“Now, Sundog!” he called out.

The cables were fired. Being as carefully tuned into the fighter as he was, Anakin didn’t need to look at the screen to know the cables had pierced the hull of the fighter with consummate accuracy. The only problem was that even that small impact knocked something further off-kilter within the fighter’s systems, and Anakin could feel the warning cry in the Force come closer.

It didn’t help that that strange feeling was still there, in the seat of his stomach.

He tried to ignore it.

“Direct hit!” announced Jesse. “But I’m getting a crap ton of warnings about the fighter’s engine, sir – she’s not going to last much longer.”

Anakin frowned. “Artoo, can you eject the engine from here?”

Two beeps and a whistle answered him. _Acknowledged._

Trusting the droid, Anakin pulled the ships closer together. “Okay, I’m reeling her in. Sundog, you get Obi-Wan into an escape pod for safety and then climb in one yourself when I release the ship, understood?”

“Sir!” Sundog acknowledged over the comm. 

Time was no less of the essence now they had the ship in their grasp. The hangar doors of the transport were nowhere near large enough for the fighter to fit through even if there had been enough space in the bay for it – but they could extend their shield around the fighter’s cockpit as they brought it in, removing Obi-Wan manually before they detached.

Sundog operated the cables from the lower terminal, pulling them in as Anakin moved the ships closer. Everything was going smoothly and yet that ripping feeling, inside Anakin – was it physical and he just hadn’t noticed? Had he actually been injured?

_No time. Just focus on the task at hand._

“She’s in range of the shields, sir!” Sundog cried over the comm.

Jesse didn’t wait to be told. “Opening hangar doors,” he announced.

There was a slight jolt with the impact of the two ships against each other, but their momentums were matched and the cables held them in place. Anakin reassured himself of Obi-Wan’s continued presence in the Force before calling –

“Artoo, can you get the cockpit open!?”

A low whistle. _Negative._

“Looks like one of the atmo-regulators blew and fused the latch,” Sundog told them. “I’m going to have to blast it open.”

“Understood.”

He knew he didn’t need to tell him to be careful. Sundog had never been anything less than the perfect trooper in the past, that was why Anakin had picked him to come as back up in a split-second after a survey of who was nearby when they’d had word of Maul’s escape. But, since it was Obi-Wan…

 _Since it’s him, he’ll be fine,_ Anakin’s inner voice insisted. _He’s still alive. He’ll be fine._

The sound of the rifle Sundog would have had to use to get through the transparent durasteel of the cockpit window seemed further away than it should have. The sharpness of that knife Anakin still felt in the Force, it took on a panicked edge, and Anakin had to push it away. The Hero with No Fear did not feel panic.

“Okay, I’m in!” said Sundog.

Another series of beeps and whistles from Artoo and Anakin realised that ejecting the fighter’s engine before it destabilised entirely might have been out of the question. Was this the warning in the Force? It didn’t feel like the usual caution the Force might send to him – it felt oppressive. Dark, almost. Was it – ?

“I’ve got him, sir!” Sundog informed them. “Looks like he’s got a nasty head-wound from the explosion, but he’s still breathing.”

 _Head wound. Bad._ That was the extent of what Anakin’s brain was able to come up with in regards to the situation. But the soon-to explode engine was probably the more pressing matter.

“Get him into the pod, Sundog,” Anakin ordered. “And comm me as soon as you’re in too.”

“On it, sir.”

Then there was a more insistent cry from Artoo, and Anakin threw his attention more fully into the force around the fighter, around the engine – he knew the make of the craft like the back of his hand, and there it was – a spark, a sudden climb in energy output. Too soon.

Without thinking he smothered that spark with the Force, but the two crafts lurched back around towards the planet, with Anakin’s arms moving as if of their own accord, his thoughts too busy elsewhere to guide them. Once the moment had passed they were headed on a direct course towards it.

“All right, he’s in, sir.”

“Good work, soldier,” Jesse replied. Anakin, in that moment, couldn’t think of how to do so himself. “Now get yourself in too.”

The planet Anakin could now see plainly was mostly grey with cloud, patches of blue and some green here and there that spatterings of light shone from – the lights of a reasonably advanced civilisation. The quick glance he’d had at the navi-comp upon exiting hyperspace had only done enough for him to register this section of space as ‘unfamiliar’.

Before he could do more now than realise the planet was inhabited, Anakin’s heart began to beat faster – too fast suddenly, in a way that bordered on painful. He didn’t know why. This strangeness in the Force was getting worse again.

That planet…

“Sir?”

It felt…

… hot.

“Sir, incoming!”

Jesse’s abrupt yell broke through to Anakin, and he veered away, but not soon enough. Somehow Maul’s weapons systems had still been functional enough for one last pot-shot at the transport and he’d taken the opportunity to launch a couple of missiles. The transport swerved, and one sailed passed harmlessly but the second struck the fighter and Anakin hit the release on the cables with no time to warn Sundog before he shot away from ship again.

He wasn’t fast enough to avoid the ensuing explosion as the fighter finally lost its battle with the damage Maul had dealt it. Debris came through the hangar doors before he could get them closed, the shield fully restored. As the force of the blast knocked Anakin forward in his seat he bit the corner of his lip hard enough to make it bleed.

“Mm – fuck!”

“Sundog?!” shouted Jesse. “Trooper, come in!”

No answer. Anakin struggled to right the ship, as he felt a tell-tale ripple in the Force. A familiar transfer of energy. Jesse tapped harshly at a button on the control panel and then swore.

“Ship’s internal comm system is down!” he exclaimed.

Hyperdrive was offline too, and one of his main engines was damaged. Life support was holding – thankfully – but the hyperspace transmitter was shot.

“Can we reach the planet?” Anakin asked.

Jesse pulled up the readout on any local communications channels. “Looks like we may be in luck there, sir,” he said. A brief look at the information readout and he opened a channel. “This is Republic transport calling ‘M-7-35-8’, Planet ‘M-7-35-8’, do you copy? We’ve taken damage and are carrying wounded, over!”

Anakin focused on Maul, the light of the other craft still just within visibility range, the presence of a Force-user steeped in the dark side pinpointing his location. In his anger, the terrible feeling in his heart was easier to ignore, and he made a beeline for him focusing the transport’s weapons.

Jesse saw what he was doing.

“Sir, ship’s internal sensors are looking screwy to me,” he cautioned. It was his way of saying that firing weapons might blow them all to smithereens.

“We’ll be all right,” Anakin told him, closing the distance. “Just hang on.”

Obi-Wan must have gotten a good round off before he’d been hit because the other ship was not taking evasive action. Anakin zeroed in and when the Force told him the moment was right, he fired.

Maul swerved at the last possible instant, the beam scoring a line across the bottom of his ship. Anakin growled, but soon saw why Maul had been so cautious, as a small explosion rocked the other side of the ship even from that small impact, and the craft dipped before righting itself.

He would have fired again, but a red warning light told him they were losing power.

The red light…

That oppression around his insides came back with a vengeance, almost enough to stave off the thought – _you disrupted the main power with that blast, you kriffing idiot, if they all die, if Obi-Wan dies, it’ll be your fault_ – but not, and yet he still had no time to try and figure out what was wrong with the Force. Something about that planet…

“Shit,” he hissed through gritted teeth.

“I’m getting reception from the planet,” Jesse told him. “Text-only.”

“They going to lend us a hand?”

There was a pause. “They want us off our current course.”

What a surprise. “I’ll land where they want me to land but I can’t leave the system now, our hyperdrive is shot and Obi-Wan needs medical attention.”

Jesse relayed the information over the comm, and there was another pause.

“… They want us off our current course.”

Anakin felt like driving his head into the terminal. “Are they threatening reprisals? Tell them we’re in pursuit of a dangerous criminal – tell them there’s a significant danger to their people if Maul lands on the planet!”

“Right, sir. ‘M-7-35-8’, we have two Jedi Generals on board, in pursuit of a wanted felon – to be considered armed and dangerous. One of the Jedi is wounded – any assistance you can provide would be most welcome, over.”

As they drew closer to the planet a more detailed map was available. The system’s sun was on their left as their course led them towards a longitude just about to enter its morning phase. Anakin could see no lights through the cloud of this part of the planet.

Part of him wanted to risk holding back to negotiate with the locals for assured assistance. Obi-Wan was still present in the Force, but dormant, unconscious, and possibly critically hurt. He’d need medical attention. But, if the locals were hostile, then following Maul might have been the better option.

Not to mention, he didn’t want to lose his chance to get Maul.

Maul’s craft was wobbling here and there, but his course remained steady enough, still heading toward the planet as the radio silence continued.

Anakin was on the brink of losing his temper.

“Jesse, can we expect _any_ support from the locals?!”

A pause.

“No good, sir. They say Maul’s headed towards a no-go area. They won’t follow.”

Anakin looked at the navigation terminal, which had picked up only a single settlement in the region Maul was headed towards. The translation for the local name suggested ‘Mound of Silence’, or ‘Silent Hill’. He gritted his teeth.

The power was draining faster than he’d thought – more than one fuel cell must have ruptured – and it was low enough now that if he tried to redirect to elsewhere on the planet, they may not have made it. If there was some kind of danger down there that the locals didn’t want to deal with, they weren’t getting away from it now.

“Then I guess we’re going in alone,” he muttered.

“Yes, sir,” said Jesse, but a moment later Anakin heard a slight hiss on the other side of his helmet. “Landing gear looks shot, sir.”

Damn it all.

“Well, you know me, Jesse. When have I ever needed landing gear!?”

If he was steering them all into certain doom then he was at least grateful he managed to get one last short bark of laughter from Jesse before they fell to their fiery deaths.

Before he resigned the ship to that, however, he did what he could to stabilise their flight path and reached out with the Force to try and help guide the ship in – something he suspected Maul was also doing ahead of them. As he’d have expected, the other ship was heading straight towards ‘Silent Hill’, and he wondered if Maul might not have come here on purpose.

As they approached the planet though, his concentration went entirely towards getting the ship to land despite the shroud of terror in the Force that resurged as soon as they broke through into the upper atmosphere.

On his right he could hear, or maybe just feel, that Jesse turned sharply towards him, and he guessed he must have cried out at the feeling that reminded him of being thrown through the crust of ice over a lake… it must have been seven, eight years ago now. The shock of something that cold had stunned him, paralysed his body completely –

How had he gotten out again?

 _Stupid,_ he told himself _. You were stupid then and you’re stupid now. Just for once do your kriffing job and focus on the kriffing ship!_

Was this sensation pain? He couldn’t even tell. He just had to keep trying to push through it. Push through it and get the transport to land, that was what he had to do. Had to do. Had to.

Had to…

It was hot, though. Hot, not cold, and he couldn’t breathe. The smell was familiar; sulphur, charred flesh and something else beneath all that that he had known before, from a long, long time ago.

He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t feel his hands on the controls – the sensitive nerves of the flesh one or the pressure on the other. It felt like that split-second in which he’d push-pulled the blades through the flesh and bone of Dooku’s neck stretched out to hours; when he’d killed-executed-murdered him, just as he was (not) supposed to, and nothing had changed. He couldn’t feel his legs either. Jesse had left the co-pilot’s seat and was right at his side now, he thought he might have been touching Anakin’s shoulders, but he couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t breathe.

They flew into the thick cloud that seemed to go on forever, drowning Anakin’s senses further, all but the foreboding wail of an incredibly archaic warning siren and his sense of the Force – through which, almost like he was hearing a voice, he felt a kind of sentiment…

_… waiting for you…_

He’d felt something like this before.

*~*~*~*

Anakin snapped back to reality only when the cloud became the ground from one instant to the next, and they landed – throwing him forward against the console hard enough to open a cut on his forehead and sending Jesse sprawling to the floor.

He gasped in a great lungful of air, into a chest that had been crushing itself from the inside out for lack of oxygen, like he’d forgotten how to breathe for the last minute or so.

 _You’ve really kriffed up this time, Skywalker,_ he decided.

Spots danced in front of his eyes, his head feeling weak and fuzzy as he continued to struggle for breath. He twisted from one way to another like he was feverish, vaguely registering the grey landscape outside the transport; fogged over to the point of zero visibility, but for a single dark shape some ways off that was probably a tree.

This was a human colony, he thought he remembered from his brief glance at the info-terminal. But then, there had been hardly any information to parse. When he looked again, the screen was entirely black. The instruments around it were dead. He didn’t even need the Force to know the ship was kriffed.

“Arrgh-ack!”

Jesse groaned from behind him and he was struck with enough immense relief that the other man had survived that his head felt a little clearer in an instant.

Obi-Wan was alive too. He’d have known if he’d died. He was alive, but subdued in the Force – probably hurt worse than when Sundog had pulled him out of his cockpit.

Sundog…

With a few stumbles, Jesse was back on his feet, though clinging to the wall for support.

“Fuck,” he said, which summed up the situation quite nicely. “Kriffing sithspit shit fuck son-of-a... fuck. Sir,” his tone changed abruptly to concern. “General, are you all right?!”

Anakin tried speaking. “J… Jesse…” he managed to wheeze out.

“Sir.” Jesse staggered over towards him. _Damn it._

“Jesse… I’m sorry. Something… in the Force… on this planet…” he coughed a little.

“It’s all right, sir,” he was assured. “I’ll get you some water, you hang on.”

The fuzzy feeling was blossoming into a sharp pain behind his brow, and pins and needles broke out across each of his flesh limbs. “Not all right…” he tried to argue. “I screwed up. Obi-Wan…”

A canteen lid was unscrewed on his right, and a cool metal cylinder pressed into his left hand.

“Here, drink up, sir,” Jesse told him. He obeyed. “Comm’s dead. I’ll check on General Kenobi, and Sundog. You sit there for a moment, make sure your spine is in one piece after that little bump we had.”

“… another happy landing,” Anakin chuckled, sipping the water slowly. His mouth tasted like blood.

Had it really been less than a single standard day since the last time? Obi-Wan would never let him hear the end of it.

Jesse snorted. “Exactly,” he said, and patted Anakin on the shoulder. “I’ll be right back.”

“I’ll be right there,” Anakin countered. Then, as Jesse opened the hatch to the cargo bay, “Jesse… about Sundog…”

He felt there should be some sort of warning, though perhaps it was telling enough they hadn’t heard a peep from him already. Jesse paused, then nodded.

“Right,” he said, before he descended the rungs and disappeared from view.

Anakin sighed in the pilot’s chair. He took a moment to try and collect himself, reaching out in the Force to see if he could identify the cause of the horrible feeling he had experienced – but it was like there was a thick, smothering wall all around him and it felt like it constricted him in the Force to a tiny radius – perhaps only as far as he could see in the fog. The Force was strong here, very strong, but in a way Anakin had never felt before, and while it didn’t feel quite like his other brushes with the dark side, it certainly felt nothing like the light.

As he sipped a little more water, Anakin tried a few buttons on the main terminals. Their communications were, indeed, dead – and Anakin foresaw a great deal of repairs in his near future. Still, there would be a separate beacon on board for just this kind of thing, so he wasn’t terribly worried.

It was only that he had a bad feeling about this place.

But he had to check on Obi-Wan before he looked too hard into that, so he pulled himself up (having not, strictly speaking, done the correct checks for possible spinal damage as Jesse had sensibly suggested) out of his chair and took a few steps to re-acquaint himself with his legs before heading towards the hatch. He had enough of the Force with him to suspect he’d avoided the worst that could have happened, unlike some.

Indeed, after he climbed down onto the lower level, he saw Jesse knelt over Sundog’s body immediately – the latter’s armour pierced with debris in many places, and a noticeably huge piece through one side of the visor on his hastily-painted-orange helmet. Anakin had felt it, he’d known he had, but with so much else going on at the time it hadn’t registered until he’d come to on the ground again, and then he’d been able to tell himself he might have been wrong, might have been confused by that… thing in the Force.

But he hadn’t. He hadn’t seen Maul’s attack coming, and Sundog hadn’t had the time to make it to the relative safety of an escape pod. Anakin closed his eyes, and felt a trickle from the cut on his forehead run down his eye. He wiped it away – roughly, making himself hiss with pain from the wound

“Wasn’t your fault, sir,” Jesse said after a weighted pause.

He jerked his head towards the far corner of the hangar, where Anakin was a little surprised to see another body, prone, clad in gold-painted armour.

“Little blighter must have gone back to get Silver out instead of going straight into the pod. Kriffing idiot,” he snarled. “He was obviously dead already. Of all the times to get sentimental.”

Whatever part of Maul’s attack that had pierced the gunner’s compartment on the fighter had clearly gone right through Silver’s chest as well, judging by the gruesome damage on his chest-plate. Anakin found himself looking around the hangar, taking in its size and the placing of the pods. Sundog couldn’t have known Maul would come around for another blow when he’d seemed to be running.

Anakin would probably have done the same in his place.

“Do you want me to…” he offered weakly. Though unspoken, Jesse would have understood that offer loud and clear. A clone trooper’s helmet was removed after death – if possible – to mark the place they’d fallen. With the shrapnel pinning Sundog’s helmet to his head, in this case it wasn’t going to be straightforward.

Jesse didn’t answer at first, just took a hold of the bigger piece and gave it an experimental tug. Anakin took this as his answer and went to the escape pod closest to the bay doors. The inner light was off, but through the small window he could see the highlights of Obi-Wans’ face illuminated by the light of the cargo bay. His eyes were closed.

These lifeboats were not the same as those you’d expect on a cruiser – you couldn’t have fit more than two of those in this cargo bay. No, these were single-occupancy pods of the sort you really hoped you were never ejected out into space inside, because they seemed to provide little more protection that a simple spacesuit. Anakin swung the door open with a deep breath.

“Master?”

No answer. Obi-Wan was breathing, but unconscious.

Reaching out to examine the wound on his old master’s head, Anakin suddenly found his flesh hand was trembling, and he quickly drew it back, clenching his fist and looking back to make sure Jesse hadn’t seen it.

But Jesse had stopped trying to pull out the debris and was sitting there quietly. Ordinarily Anakin would have expected him to push through any sentiment of his own and rip the damn thing out forthwith, then move on to the other pieces. However, something here was different. Anakin hadn’t had a chance to ask what he’d been doing before he’d arrived, how the battle on Mandalore had been going, why he was at that stronghold and not with Rex and Ahsoka, and at the time he hadn’t paid it any mind. It had just been –

 _“You up for some hunting, Jesse?”_ And – _“You bet, General!”_

And off they’d gone. Now he thought about it, something had to have happened for Jesse to have been there.

 _Obi-Wan first_ , he told himself. He reached out again and, as gently as he could, tilted Obi-Wan’s head so he could look at the wound. A patch of sticky red was left on the seat. Anakin winced, but Obi-Wan didn’t move a muscle except for a soft exhale.

The hair on this side of his head was dark with blood, and obscured the wounds themselves. Anakin removed the glove on his right hand and tentatively probed between the strands as a trickle of crimson ran down his pale skin, followed closely by a second a half-inch away. Anakin’s heart began to pound uncomfortably again.

He could feel a dent in Obi-Wan’s skull. It might have gone all the way… through – he couldn’t tell. But Obi-Wan was still alive, still breathing, so Anakin willed himself to remain calm.

_If he’s alive it might help if you did something towards keeping him that way, idiot._

“Hang on, Master,” he murmured. “Let’s get you to the med-station.”

The pod was constructed so that it was easy to do this, fortunately; the seat sliding out with a gurney folding out from under it. The transport’s med-station was inside the cargo bay, and Anakin pushed the gurney into it, activating the med-scanner and the small droid, neither of which seemed to have been damaged in the battle, thankfully.

His mechanical hand was covered in Obi-Wan’s blood when he pulled it away to let the droid work. Anakin found himself staring at it for a long moment, feeling a sudden sense of foreboding, before he snapped himself out of it and sterilised it at the station next to Obi-Wan’s head.

A bright blue light was sweeping slowly over his master’s face as he stood there, identifying all injuries. He was still breathing.

He would be fine. He had to be.

Behind him, Jesse was still unmoving. Anakin walked over without a word. He dropped down to his knees beside Sundog’s body and felt out the shrapnel in the Force. With particular concentration, Anakin was able to ease the offending debris out of flesh and faceplate both. It made a horrible squelching noise, particularly the piece that had been lodged in Sundog’s eye, and when Jesse pulled the helmet off they were met with a terrible sight; one eye gone, the other open and staring – a hole in his cheek large enough to see teeth that had been knocked out lying haphazard inside his mouth.

It was grotesque, but of course they had both seen much worse.

“Kriffing idiot,” said Jesse again, tiredly. Anakin reached over and closed Sundog’s open eye.

“You take any damage?” he asked.

Jesse shook his head. “I’m fine. Just a bit banged up.”

“And on Mandalore?”

That gave Jesse pause for thought. “Sorry, sir,” he said at length. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you. Maul…”

Anakin looked at him sharply. “Maul? What did Maul do?”

“… We’d tracked him to the lower levels – I’d run into him with a squad, but you know how many clones it takes to go up against a Force-user, sir.” A certain besalisk general’s name was never mentioned among the 501st, but Anakin felt himself twitch. “Anyway, when he realised I was older than the others he let me live so he could,” he paused, waving his hand, “… use the Force, to see what was in my head.”

Anakin stood up, angrily, clicking his tongue and surveying the latest consequences of Maul’s carnage. Sundog and Silver dead and Obi-Wan with a still-bleeding head wound – _head wounds always bleed a lot, he’ll be fine, he’s Obi-Wan_ – that the droid was carefully shearing the hair away from. Anakin had only had a chance to glance at the casualty list after it had been updated following Maul’s escape from Mandalore – little more than to make sure Rex and Ahsoka hadn’t been on it – but the numbers of his own troops, not to mention the reserves on the list that would no doubt grow when the critically wounded had gone one way or the other, had been painful to look at.

Above all, Anakin had never forgotten Qui Gon Jinn. Someone needed to put Maul down like the rabid _animal_ he was. And Anakin had already killed one Sith in the last twenty-four hours…

“He wanted to know about you in particular, sir – and about Commander Tano when he realised you weren’t there.”

Jesse sounded worried, but this was no surprise to Anakin. “Ahsoka said as much during her report when we were on our way,” he told him. “It’s no big mystery – Maul already killed Obi-Wan’s master and his – that is, one of his closest friends. Now he’s decided he’s going to kill me too, to make Obi-Wan suffer more.” He found himself smirking. “Though I like to think he’d reconsider if he’d seen what just happened to Count Dooku.”

Though, come to think of it, Ahsoka had sounded like there was something else Maul was up to when it came to him. Something she hadn’t wanted to say over the comm…

“That’s right,” said Jesse, sounding lighter now. “I didn’t get a chance to congratulate you, sir. Now all we have to do is get rid of the bloody king of the clankers and the war’s as good as won.”

“Him, and whoever was pulling Dooku’s strings,” muttered Anakin.

“Right,” Jesse replied, a little more subdued. Slowly, his head turned to the one actual piece of cargo in the bay, the piece that had had Bo-Katan Kryze almost try to bite his head off for casually commandeering. The Force-suppression chamber. “That’s why they wanted us to get Maul alive. He knows who it is, doesn’t he?”

“Hmm,” Anakin glanced at the box and then quickly away again, back to Obi-Wan. “Well, I can’t say I like our chances for getting the opportunity to use it.”

Jesse, he suspected, knew exactly what he meant by that. He didn’t respond with anything more than a wry chuckle before changing the subject. “Hard to believe it could all be over soon.”

Before Anakin could reply there was a noise from one of the storage compartments near the hatch, and after a few bangs against the door it got the message, sliding open to allow what had been trapped inside to slide out with an indignant whistle.

“Artoo!” Anakin cried, with a small laugh. “There you are, buddy. You get knocked in there by the blast?”

For the past few minutes Anakin had feared the droid might have been swept out into open space, and only now did his relief calm the general anxious feeling at the back of his mind that had been there since they’d landed. Artoo, who had probably been banged up hard enough to require some small self-repairs as he was certainly sporting a few new scratches in his outer shell, moved up to Anakin with a series of rapid beeps and jolted him slightly as he passed.

“Hey!” Anakin called after him. Then he rolled his eyes. “I’m sorry about the landing, Artoo – I’m sure you’d have done much better.”

Artoo answered: _Acknowledged._

His reaction was more dismayed upon realising what had happened to the two clones, and to Obi-Wan, whose attendant med-droid he had a short conversation with while Anakin and Jesse exchanged a look.

Jesse took the opportunity to move his finger near his upper lip, as if to say Anakin had something on his face there. Anakin swiped at it with his left hand.

Blood.

Still wet. Had he hit his nose as well as his forehead on the way down?

Well, it didn’t seem to be bleeding now. He rubbed his sleeve over it a few times for good measure, approaching the med-station once more. The scan seemed to have finished already.

“What’s the prognosis?” he asked.

The med-droid, unable to access the dead screen beside it, transmitted the file to Artoo who displayed it holographically. Anakin found himself hissing at what he read.

“How is he?” asked Jesse.

“Not great,” replied Anakin. “Some of this stuff I don’t know the meaning of, but I can get the gist. There are actually twelve wounds to the head, five of which have gone right through the scalp, one of which may have just gotten through the skull. It’s not necessarily fatal, as long as the droid keeps an eye on any possible bleeding in the brain, but if we don’t get him to a proper medical facility then there’s a good chance of long-term damage.”

 _But we will get to a proper medical facility_ , Anakin told himself, frowning at Obi-Wan’s paler than usual cheek. _And he’ll be fine. There’s no other way this could end._

“Ah.” Jesse climbed to his feet with a small flinch from whatever Anakin’s landing skills had left him with. He was more injured than he’d let on, Anakin knew that with sudden clarity. “Must be an emergency beacon on board.”

“Artoo?” Anakin asked.

With a whistle of agreement the droid glided over to the adjacent corner of the bay, opening a small hatch in the floor with an emergency symbol printed on it and revealing a small survival kit, including ration packs, short-range communicators, small med-kits and the desired emergency beacon – a box about twelve by eight by eight inches that seemed to have been thankfully cushioned from any damage from the crash inside a foam mould within the hatch. Jesse pulled it out and Artoo opened it, revealing a blue light that promptly started flashing.

“Good, it works,” said Anakin. “But we’d better do what we can to fix the ship, because if the locals won’t come here then I don’t know where the nearest relay is. I don’t think you want to end up having to settle down and make a home with me here.”

Jesse snorted. “Well, while I’d be honoured, of course, it just wouldn’t be the same without the rest of the boys. You planning to head to that settlement we saw on the scanner?”

“Don’t think I have much choice,” said Anakin. “You stay here and keep an eye on the beacon – we’ll use these to stay in touch.” He grabbed the short-range communicators and tossed one of them to Jesse.

He caught it, but Anakin sensed his reluctance even without the Force. “Can’t say I like the idea of you going out there alone, General. Rex would string me up by my eyelids if anything happened.”

Anakin laughed. “Imagine what Cody would do to both of us if we left Obi-Wan alone,” he countered. “Besides, Maul is still alive – knowing him, and knowing him that means anyone living in the settlement is in danger.”

The order about clones not engaging Force-users except if there was no other choice didn’t need to be said; Anakin just prayed Jesse didn’t take this as his saying ‘you’d only slow me down’.

“I’ll take Artoo,” he added, sensing Jesse was still unhappy about this either way. “He’ll know exactly what we’ll need.”

Artoo beeped in agreement.

“And you’ll be all right with that thing?” Jesse asked.

“That thing?”

Technically, Anakin already knew what he was talking about. But he didn’t want to think about it now. Not when Obi-Wan – and Jesse, for that matter – needed him to come through for them.

“That… ‘thing’, in the Force?” Jesse asked. Something he’d been trying to hold back spilled forth. “Sir, when we were going down you started bleeding from the nose well before we hit anything.”

 _Oh, that’s where the blood came from_. In a way it was a relief to realise there _had_ been a physical effect.

“Yeah. Well, whatever it is, hopefully it’ll be as much of an inconvenience to Maul as it will be to me.”

“Even if it’s a ‘Dark’ thing?”

Anakin grimaced, as he approached the hatch.

“ ‘Dark’ things tend not to like the light _or_ each other.”

There was silence as the doors opened, with Artoo’s help, and Anakin dropped down into the mist below. But before he left there was one last call from inside the transport.

“Sir?”

He looked back up at Jesse in time to see the med-kit and ration pack heading his way, which he caught, smiling.

“Thanks, Jesse.”

“No problem, sir. You take care of yourself out there. I happen to like my eyelids as they are.”

Anakin laughed. “I’ll see you soon, then.”

With that, he set off through the fog for ‘Silent Hill’.

*~*~*~*


	2. Silent Hill

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Bonfire Night, fellow UK-lings. Thank you so much to everyone who has read to this point, left kudos or comments so far. 
> 
> In this chapter: Anakin gets his fetch quest, immediately splits up with his partner like he doesn't know what genre I've thrown him in to, visits a burger bar, has an interesting encounter in a cemetery and meets a friendly doggo!

*~*~*~*~*

The fog was a nightmare.

With Artoo using his headlamp on its most powerful setting they were able to make their way through at a slow pace, but it almost seemed to Anakin that the fog was acting as a fog in the Force, as well as a physical thing in itself. He could feel the Force still – the ship behind him and the presence of Obi-Wan and Jesse, the plant life around him and the planet he was walking on, yet it was distant and fuzzy, like a broken transmission.

Artoo had a few choice remarks, the first time Anakin almost tripped on a gnarled root.

By some miracle, they had crashed within a half-kilometre of a manmade path, though it was almost as much of a miracle even then that they actually found it in the fog. It was a road, poorly maintained but usable, which suggested ground-traversing vehicles had at least at one point been a main staple of life around these parts. That suggested the colony had either been here a while, or had been founded by believers in low-tech solutions.

Either one might have explained why there had been so little information about this place, but Anakin would have bet on the former. The place had an ‘old’ feeling to it. Then again, there was no reason it couldn’t have been both.

“Which way, Artoo?” he asked lightly.

Artoo replied, in so many words, that it wasn’t his decision.

“Yeah, I am the Jedi knight, aren’t I?” muttered Anakin.

He looked left, into the fog, and then right, into more fog.

“Are you not picking up anything at all in the local area? Any communications, public broadcasts, energy signatures… what about Maul’s ship?”

_Negative_ , Artoo told him.

Probably too badly damaged. Anakin grimaced and wracked his brain. “What about Maul’s prosthetics?” he asked. “Those have got to be giving off some kind of signature, if he’s still alive.”

The Force may have been muted – and growing muter – but Anakin still had the bad feeling that he was.

After a small wait and a ‘working’ whirr, Artoo replied that he’d found a possible signature.

Anakin waved his hand out. “Well then, let’s try following that.” And he made as if to carry on in the direction Artoo had been facing, but the droid hesitated. “You coming?”

_Analysing_ , Artoo told him. Anakin laughed.

“Come on. You’re not scared of Maul, are you? Artoo, anyone he runs into is going to be in far more danger than we are from him.”

A vehement series of beeps followed.

“… all right, than _I_ am from him, but don’t worry. I’ll protect you.”

Artoo whirred in a way Anakin chose not to interpret literally.

“Hey, I’m not going to let him get me. If Snips was able to hold her own against him, I think I can manage.”

His memory protested – _“I… don’t think he was trying to kill me, Master.”_ – but he shook it off. Even if Maul had been holding back against Ahsoka for whatever twisted scheme he had brewing, Anakin was still confident he could defeat him. He’d defeated – _executed, murdered_ – Dooku, after all.

_“He’s too dangerous to leave alive!”_

Maul was surely no less dangerous than Dooku. He was never going to stop coming after Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan had suffered enough. He was probably weakened from the crash too. Now was the time to…

He walked into an area of higher pressure and heard a high-pitched buzz that seemed to come from inside his own skull, the wound on his temple throbbing a little again.

_Focus,_ he told himself.

“… we need to find parts for the ship anyway,” he said distantly. There seemed to be movement out in the fog, and he peered as hard as he could but for some reason, like he knew he was only seeing things, he didn’t ask Artoo to shine his light in the direction the motion had seemed to come from.

_Focus. It’s just the wind._

There was a burst of static from his communicator, as if on cue, and it almost startled him – like an insect sting. He shook it off and pulled out the device. The voice that came through was familiar, but garbled.

“… Sir? … can hear… through? …r, on the… boost… gnal… etter?”

“Jesse?” Anakin called. “Jesse, are you reading me, over?”

“…eading you. Can y… ry the…”

The signal was this bad from what had to have been less than three kilometres? Frowning, Anakin did what he could to boost the connection.

“Can you hear me now, Jesse, over?”

“… can hear you better now, sir,” Jesse responded, and Anakin felt the tension in the air thin just a little. “But the line sti… n’t great. And this tracking map is blood… seless – … less you’ve decided to teleport about the place every f… moments, over.”

“What, you didn’t know Jedi could do that?” Anakin asked with a half-forced laugh. “No, Artoo and I seem to be stuck on the same road – can you get a look at the terrain using that map?”

“…gative. Shows where you are in …lation to it only. No luck with the data terminal either, but from what I could tell… t mu… u… even if we did get it working, over.”

“Understood. What are our main priorities?”

There was a burst of static that sounded like Jesse might have just groaned into the comm. “Fuel tanks are shot, both of them. I can patch both up a… ut in the on-board spare for main power, but for the hyperdrive we’re going to need… least one more unit.”

_Great_ , thought Anakin. _And there’s no guarantee they even have hyperfuel in town, especially if they’ve gone low-tech._

“Well, I’ll make that top of our shopping list. What else?”

“… what I can tell, life support is functional, but the internal sensor array has been …maged, and the ship won’t leave atmo if it can’t confirm life …port functionality. Problem is the zirconia in the array’s bee… urned to a crisp, and there’s no replacement on board.”

Anakin hissed with annoyance, trying to think of a way he could bypass that catch or convince the computer that life-support was functional without it. Artoo might have been able to manage it, but it was an uncertain thing, and even if it was possible it might have taken days – days Obi-Wan might not have.

“Okay, hyperfuel and zirconia. What about external sensors, where are we with those?”

The instrumentation for that would have been located very near those for internal sensors.

“Well, w… all right for local proximity,” said Jesse.

“And navigation?”

There was a short pause. “That one might be a problem, sir. I can probably jury-rig up a new chip to get it functional, but I don’t know… re we’ll get the relevant data from if ole’ Artoo-ey doesn’t have it on store.”

“Not for this system,” said Anakin, having checked what information Artoo might have had in his data banks before they’d left. “But of the three you’ve mentioned, a data chip with the local star charts is probably the one I’m most likely to find.” He sighed. “If Obi-Wan would stop lazing around, he could probably look out the window, find a familiar constellation and point us in the right direction.”

He though he heard Jesse chuckle over the comm. “No change to General Kenobi’s condition, sir. But the med-droid is assuring me he’s not bleeding into his brain at the moment, so he’s stable.”

_But for how long?_ Anakin wondered, his chest feeling tight.

“I’ll see what medical facilities they have in town, if I ever reach it.”

If he was even going in the right direction. The fog stretched out endlessly and the Force was all but silent on that and most other fronts. It sent a shudder down Anakin’s spine he quickly brushed off.

“Are we going to need anything else?”

“… get off-world and back to Republic space those three are what we really need,” said Jesse. “But I’ll mention it now, sir… ing to be iffy as to whether we can get weapons online.”

_Of course_. Still, it wasn’t as though he thought Maul was going to be doing any more shooting at them, though he wouldn’t have liked to guess at their chances if there turned out to be Separatist activity in the system.

“No worries there,” he said. “If worst comes to worst, we can use the transport as a battering ram.”

Jesse laughed. There followed a longer burst of static until Jesse faded back in with “ – will let me know if you need backup out there, sir?”

“Will do, Jesse,” Anakin lied. “And you get in touch immediately if you see Maul approaching the ship.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll keep working until I hear from you – I’ve got the droid set up for periodic scans and it’ll warn me if there’s any change in General Kenobi’s condition.”

Anakin’s heart shuddered a bit, three beats rapidly in a row just at the thought of Obi-Wan and his blood-soaked hair, but even if the Force wasn’t responding to him it was fortunately still accepting those feelings, at least for now. Which reminded him…

“Thanks, Jesse.” He took a deep breath. “Jesse, listen, there’s something weird going on with the Force in this place. I can’t explain it, but… well. Just be careful in general, won’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” Jesse said, though he hesitated, like perhaps he’d wanted to insist on following Anakin out into the fog. “Should we set up a check-in time?”

“Good idea. Let’s say three hours?”

“Setting a timer now, sir.” A pause. “All right, done.”

“Speak again in three hours or less then,” said Anakin. “Over and out.”

“Over and out.”

Anakin clipped the communicator back onto his belt and shook off another chill in his shoulders. For a moment, his lightsaber felt oddly heavy at his side, and he looked back the way they’d came, wondering if it was a warning in the Force. He couldn’t look long, though, it made him abruptly dizzy – like he would get turned around if he didn’t keep heading in the same direction – and sent another pang through the wound on his temple.

_You’re being an awful pain for such a small scrape,_ he thought with irritation.

Would Jesse be all right on his own? Now that Maul had been inside his head once he’d be more aware of his presence in general, and he didn’t like the clone’s chances against a Sith, especially if he was standing between that particular Sith and Obi-Wan.

But unfortunately, even the supposed Chosen One couldn’t get a transport into hyperspace with the power of the Force – or at least Anakin hadn’t figured that one out yet. If they were really lucky the beacon would get through to their allies in a timely fashion after all, but Anakin wasn’t feeling that lucky today.

A few paces further forward, Artoo whistled. Anakin caught up to where he was standing and followed the line of his headlamp to the object it had fallen upon through the fog. It was a large sign, fixed to two wooden posts. Anakin had to come even closer to make out the message, which was fortunately in Basic.

**Welcome to Silent Hill**

The letters were in a friendly style, and if not for the intense fog surrounding them Anakin would have thought the sign was quaint and charming. The fog, and the deep scratch across one corner. A number of things could have made it, but Anakin couldn’t help but feel like something violent had happened.

Still, it didn’t look like Maul’s work. And at least they were going in the right direction.

*~*~*~*~*~*

The border of the town was still over a kilometre away from the sign. It took half a standard hour for them to reach it, but it felt far, far longer.

Anakin was troubled the whole way by a great catalogue of things the Force would not accept from him, as top of that list was that by the time he saw the walls of buildings through the fog, he could barely feel anything in the Force at all.

His hand seemed to twitch towards his lightsaber every other minute – visions of Maul leaping out of the mist in a flash of red light flitting through his head.

_Come on_ , he told himself. _Hero With No Fear, remember?_

Well, maybe Maul wouldn’t try to kill him if Obi-Wan wasn’t there to watch. With a snort he imagined Maul standing at Obi-Wan’s bedside with his saber to Anakin’s neck, tapping his cybernetic foot impatiently as he waited for him to come out of unconsciousness. But then he thought again of what Ahsoka had said, or been trying to say, as they had approached Mandalore.

Maul was after him. Fair enough, it made sense he would be. But was it only for the obvious reasons? That had seemed to be what Ahsoka had been having difficulty with.

At least Ahsoka was all right, and Rex was with her. The Chancellor had been delivered safely back to Coruscant, Dooku – _He’s too dangerous to be left alive_ – was dead and even Grievous wouldn’t try anything soon after that defeat, so Palpatine, Padme, and everyone else on the planet was safe.

He sighed. He hadn’t even had a chance to do more than meet eyes with Padme across the senate floor before the message had come through that Maul had escaped custody on Mandalore. It hadn’t been like he could just leave Ahsoka there on her own.

_Obi-Wan’s the one you have to look after now_ , he thought. Then, half-fondly, _he gets into more trouble than the two of them put together._

_You can ask Maul if he feels like telling you what he wanted with you before you cut his head off too._

No, that was wrong. Maul had to be taken alive if possible. He knew the identity of the Sith Master and who knew what else.

_Maybe you can ask him_ that _before you cut his head off instead._

_Who knows? Maybe the one thing ties in to the other._

There was another flash of pain at his temple.

And that was when the first building emerged through the fog. Immediately Anakin was unnerved, because he would have expected to hear the sounds of a settlement through this cover long before he was able to see anything. Yet aside from his own footsteps on the road and the barely discernible whir of Artoo’s power cells, there was nothing.

Artoo gave him a low whistle.

“Well, looks like we made it to town,” Anakin said, not quite managing cheerfulness.

He brightened a little to see a flicker of light on the side of the building. It was from a holographic display board, and with no small relief he took in the map of the town, and the transfer mark indicating the map was available for upload to compatible devices for free. Not only did this mean they’d be able to find their way around, but it also meant there was still a power supply in town.

Anakin transferred the map to his communicator and motioned for Artoo to take a copy as well.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll cover more ground if we split up. Now, where oh where would we find hyperfuel in this place…?”

Scanning the map of Silent Hill he took in the general layout of the town – a small settlement south of a large lake named ‘Toluca’. There was an arrow on the display that indicated ‘Old’ Silent Hill continued on the northern shore of the lake, but when he tried to scroll up the display indicated an error message and he returned to the map of ‘New’ Silent Hill, where they had entered.

The largest building on this part of the map was the ‘Research Station’, about a kilometre west of the edge of town, out on the south shore of the lake. That one seemed like a pretty good bet, but Anakin also picked out a ‘Med Centre’ on the west side of town that was probably worth a visit. Most buildings weren’t labelled, and were probably private residences, but there were also buildings marked ‘retail’, a ‘Leisure Centre’, a park and best of all, a mechanic’s.

“Here,” he said. “We might be able to find all three in one go if we’re lucky.” He made a quick calculation regarding time and distance. “In which case… Artoo, you head to the Med Centre and see if you can find anything that might help Obi-Wan. I’ll head towards the mechanic’s and we’ll meet back here in about an hour – sound good?”

Artoo promptly informed him that it did not.

“Relax. I don’t think Maul has anything against astromechs; he’s practically half-droid himself. You should be fine strolling through town.”

The droid beeped furiously at him. Anakin chuckled.

“All right, I’m sorry for making the comparison – you’re nothing alike.”

That was not the only thing Artoo had a gripe with, though.

“Me? Pfft. Look, whatever’s wrong with the Force in this place, he’ll be feeling it too. And since I’m willing to bet that, like me, he uses the Force to augment deficiencies in his prosthetics, he’s going to be at even more of a disadvantage since his comprise so much of him. And that’s if he somehow managed to escape being damaged in the crash. You go on ahead and try to make contact with any of the locals if you come across them – if nothing else they should at least be warned there’s a madman running around.”

But Artoo beeped at him again, with insistence.

“Look, if I’m not back in four hours, go back to the ship with whatever you have, okay? I’ll do the same for you.”

Though Artoo acknowledged, somehow he sounded reluctant. There was an awkward pause and Anakin sighed.

“Are you still not picking up any actual signs of life?”

_Negative_ , Artoo told him. It seemed he had a signal that might have come from a prosthetic somewhere withing a five-mile radius, but that was all.

Anakin frowned and glanced at the holographic display board. If the technology of this place had advanced as far as holograms, even basic ones like this, he would have expected Artoo to pick up _something_ from anyone living here; communications, broadcasts, power fluctuations from someone switching a light on – for crying out loud.

It was a no-go area of the planet, the locals had told them. Artoo would have picked up something like a radiation leak in the area, but he wouldn’t necessarily have known if a viral infection had made it necessary to evacuate the town. For all he knew, it was something far more obvious, and the fog was just obscuring it.

But while Obi-Wan’s life was hanging in the balance there was no point in standing around pondering what could have been going on. He jerked his head towards the road into town.

“Let’s get a move on,” he said.

Artoo acknowledged, and they went their separate ways into the fog.

Fortunately for Anakin, it was marginally easier to see where he was going in town. The fog was still thick, but the streets were lit, adding to the eerie feeling that there really should have been people around. However, Anakin knew some automated power systems had the potential to last hundreds of years, so this was all completely explainable, just incredibly uncanny at the same time.

Within a few moments, however, and as stupid as it sounded, Anakin felt a wave of dread from being completely on his own. He thought about contacting Jesse for an update, but the list of repairs Jesse would need to do to get the transport into a state wherein the parts Anakin would hopefully find could actually be used, was long. Jesse hadn’t been unaffected by the last twelve hours either; it was better to leave him in relative peace unless something came up, Anakin decided.

He sighed. Without access to the transport’s information system, long-range communication or the net, he couldn’t take another look at the list of men who had been lost – either above Coruscant, or on Mandalore. All he’d done was make sure Rex wasn’t on it.

A year ago he’d have had a dozen names he had to check. Now, since the Bad Batch hadn’t been anywhere near either battle, it was just Rex and Jesse. He wasn’t forming the same bonds with the newer men. He knew who they were, but…

Progress, maybe. Master Yoda or Master Windu probably would have thought so. Obi-Wan too, even. But Anakin…

_“They’re doing_ their _job.”_

His heart beat faster.

… he had a lightsaber in each hand. A red one…

Anakin shook his head. He didn’t want to think about what had happened on the _Invisible Hand_ now. The Chancellor was safe, and that was what mattered.

Still, there was little else to focus on but the fog.

Not a single sound but his own footsteps broke the silence now that Artoo had moved out of hearing range. Not even the wind. The buildings were old-fashioned; mostly concrete, and the few vehicles he passed on the road were old – a speeder and a hover-car, but both covered in grime like they’d been left there decades ago. A glance at both was enough for him to know it would take ten times as long to get either in working condition as it would to just walk.

The funny thing was, however, that the speeder looked like it had crashed abruptly into a wrought-iron fence in front of one house. If something had happened here a long time ago, then fair enough – perhaps there had been a panic and someone had crashed their speeder. But the skid marks on the road leading to the crash – they were still visible, and indeed, looked almost fresh.

There was even a suspicious dark stain…

_All right, come on, Fearless One_ , he sneered internally. _Do we need to go back to Jedi basics? Live in the moment, idiot. The Force is with you. Just follow the map to the mechanic’s. You turn right at the next intersection, so keep right so you don’t miss the turn in the fog. Force knows Obi-Wan will make fun of you if –_

His inner pep-talk to himself was interrupted by a flash of movement. The intersection he was trying to look out for was still a ways ahead, but the lights on the corners revealed just enough of it for Anakin to see a shadow pass; a shadow with the size and gait to have belonged to a person, casually strolling down that road.

“Hey!” Anakin called out.

There was no answer. Still fearing for the safety of any locals who came across Maul, Anakin broke into a run to where he’d seen the shadow and whirled around – just in time to catch a glimpse of a figure in the fog down the right-hand path.

“Hey, wait!” he cried.

The figure did not wait. It was a man, Anakin thought, probably human, with white hair and the glimpse of a white beard. He could make out a dark brown robe around the man’s shoulders that disappeared when its bearer turned right, down a small lane Anakin wouldn’t have known was there but for a glance at his map.

Anakin ran after the man, peering desperately at the thick cloud that surrounded him on all sides for a third glance at this glimmer of company, but he saw nothing. He did, however, hear something at long last– a strange yet familiar hissing nose coming from his right.

He turned, and even in this fog the sudden garish colour he was faced with startled him. He was looking at a mostly glass-fronted building, with a huge purple and green logo and big red letters spelling out:

**Happy Burger!**

… above the glass doors. Had the old man gone inside _this_ place?

It seemed the most likely scenario, but it was still weird – even in those two flashes that Anakin had seen him the man had carried an air of refinement that seemed incongruous with a place called ‘Happy Burger’. Still, Anakin didn’t hesitate. He dashed to the door and pushed it open with his left hand, the right hovering over his saber as he took in the diner’s interior.

It was… normal. A long counter at which sat a dozen or so stools and a row of booths along the front wall with two more going along each adjacent one. One of the stools had been knocked over, but there was nothing to indicated it hadn’t been like that for years.

Or hours, rather. There was no dust in the place that Anakin could see, and that hissing noise –

He peered over the counter. There was a grill, switched on, and two patties of some kind of meat cooking on it – the hiss coming from the sizzle of the oil. That all but settled it.

_Well, unless Maul showed up and decided to start flipping a few burgers for himself, someone from the town must have been here recently…_

But there was still no sound from outside, no movement in the fog he could see through the window and, most worryingly, nothing in the Force.

Literally nothing now – Anakin reached out but it was like trying to take a breath with a pillow shoved over his face, the attempt was actually almost painful. He couldn’t feel the Force.

Subconsciously he reached for his neck, as though he might find a suppressing collar there, but he already knew in his racing heart that it wasn’t anything to do with him. That there was something wrong with this place.

_Calm down_ , he told himself. _You’ve been without the Force before. Just stay alert and keep moving._

Now, where did that old man go?

Anakin tried to go around to the back of the diner, but the door was locked – and with a low-tech lock needing a key of shaped metal. There wasn’t much he could do outside of using his lightsaber to slice through, and the situation really didn’t seem to call for that yet.

Instead, he called through the door. “Hey, is there someone back there? I’m not here to hurt you – our ship crashed and I need to find parts to repair it.”

No answer. Without the Force he had no idea whether he was alone in the building or not.

“Look,” he tried again. “… there’s a dangerous man out there – the one who shot us down? He’s a red zabrak with prosthetic legs – probably armed somehow.” They’d taken Maul’s lightsaber before he escaped, but if the ship he’d taken hadn’t had weapons on it then Anakin was the princess of Kashyyyk. “If there’s a police or military presence in the area…”

He trailed off when the silence went on.

_I’m wasting time. Obi-Wan needs me._

As he turned to leave he had a better view of the space behind the counter, and something caught his eye next to the grill. It was a vaguely cuboid object of about three by two inches with a transparent window on one face, a clip on the other and a switch on one side. A rudimentary flashlight.

It sat on the plastic table-top on top of a folded piece of paper, which made Anakin frown with interest. He hadn’t seen actual paper in a while.

He remembered being dragged along to an exhibition of folded paper by the Chancellor – ‘invited’, rather, but how can you refuse the Chancellor of the entire Republic? Especially when you’re having an argument with… anyway, even though he hadn’t wanted to go he’d ended up glad he had. The Chancellor had known so much about the subject – and about so much in general, that Anakin had never been bored once.

On the contrary, he’d come away feeling a lot more cultured. Something he no doubt sorely needed. He picked up the small, folded over sheet and unfolded it.

_There’s something weird going on at the burial ground_

That was it, that was all the note said – with no indication of who it had been meant for or who it was from. But Anakin’s mind instantly went to Maul when he heard ‘something weird’ and he brought up the map of the town again, hastily scanning it for the burial ground.

It was on the southwest corner of Silent Hill, not far from where he’d come in. Out of his way, but since it could have been Maul…

Anakin took one last look at the closed door, picked up the flashlight, turned the grill off – he could already hear Obi-Wan whining about prudence and good citizenship in his mind – and ran back out onto the street.

Outside something seemed stranger even than before; another change in air pressure, or a far-away echo he just couldn’t quite pin down as to whether it was real or all in his head. Every time he tried to focus on the thing – sound? – he ended up hearing nothing. Again he considered trying to contact Jesse, but again he thought better of it.

_Not until I actually confirm Maul’s presence_ , he decided. _For all I know, the locals pulled his corpse out of his wrecked ship and have all gathered at the burial ground to dispose of it._

(He knew very well that wasn’t what had happened)

The flashlight was fairly powerful, he was pleased to see, and more so than he would have expected. He still stuck to the sidewalk to avoid missing any crucial turns, ending up on what looked to be a residential street of brick houses behind short brick walls.

One end of one wall had crumbled – something had struck it or it had fallen apart due to age, and a few bricks were strewn across the path. Anakin thought back to the wrecked speeder and wondered why it and these bricks had just been left lying in the road, if there were still people living here.

He turned another corner onto a street parallel to a tall, spiked iron fence, over which the burial ground supposedly lay amidst the thick fog. There was a gate with a chain around it leading inside, but the chain had just been haphazardly wrapped around the bars without a lock of any kind and it fell away when Anakin pulled at it.

As much as death was a natural process in the Force, coming into this place set Anakin’s teeth on edge. It was large, for the size of the town it served, and gravelly – at least in the places Anakin’s flashlight was falling on. There was hardly anything in the way of grass, only small stone mounds, most of which had weathered past the point of being able to see the names inscribed on them.

Then he saw a much larger monolith through the mist. It towered over everything, about five metres high, and at first he thought it must have been a memorial to some kind of tragedy, or war, but when he got close enough to the obelisk to see its surface the stone was smooth, except for two words of Basic.

****

**_Remember  
Failure_ **

“No. No, no, no…”

The muttering caught his attention before he had a chance to think about that strange inscription. They came from the other side of the monument, and he recognised the voice from holo-recordings of the threats he’d sent to Obi-Wan.

Maul.

Anakin drew his lightsaber at once, extending the blade –

It flickered and went out in an instant.

“What?”

He spoke without thinking, so dumbfounded was he by this turn of events, and in response he saw a shadow stir just beyond the stone. Frantically, he pressed on the button again and again, smacking the hilt against his other hand a few times and taking a step back.

“Kenobi?”

Maul’s voice sounded almost dazed. Anakin saw his blurry outline rise up from where he had been kneeling before the stone, hesitating, and despite this sudden and devastating disadvantage Anakin couldn’t help but –

“No such luck. Obi-Wan has better things to do than play with you every time you throw a tantrum, Maul.”

“ _Skywalker…_ ”

Maul sounded inordinately pleased to see him, as he stepped through the fog to a position close enough for both to see the other. The zabrak was looking more the worse for wear: two horns badly chipped on his left side – one with dried blood crusted around the scalp. He seemed thin, eyes sunken, dark patches visible on some of the red that Anakin guessed were particularly bad bruises – and he was twitching every so often – shivering, maybe. It was a crisp day in Silent Hill and zabraks were made for warmer weather in general.

But despite all this, he was grinning. His golden eyes found Anakin’s at once, and when Anakin held his gaze he glanced instead at his saber, and snorted.

“I’m afraid you won’t be getting any joy out of that,” he told him. “The kyber won’t work here. There’s… a _hole_ , in the Force…”

“What?” _A hole in the Force?_ “What’s that supposed to mean – how can there be a hole in the Force?!”

“A long story,” replied Maul. “Fruits from the Sith Lords of old. Do they not speak of Silent Hill, among the Jedi? They must know about it – you’re not the first of your kind to be drawn in, and the knight _did_ escape with the girl.” He paused, eyes wandering off to look at nothing before squaring in on Anakin again. “Perhaps they consider it forbidden knowledge. They do forbid a lot of knowledge, don’t they – your masters? Your Jedi masters, I should perhaps specify.”

Anakin had no idea what he was talking about, but without a weapon his options were limited.

“Look, I don’t have time for this,” he snapped. “Where are the people who live here, have you done something to them!?”

Maul just laughed – a weird, broken sound. “The people who live here? Oh, I’m sure they’re around somewhere. What about Kenobi? He’s not dead, or you would have tried to kill me five minutes ago. Is he here?”

“Like I said, he has better things to do.”

“He was injured…” Maul announced, cocking his head. Anakin grit his teeth and cursed himself for whatever he’d said that had given that away, “… or he would have tried to come in with you. But is he _here_?” he paused, looking as though he was thinking it over. “… I don’t think he is, is he?”

“Not here in this burial ground? Nothing gets past you, does it?”

“You’ll need a weapon, if you’re going to go any further.”

_Don’t know why I expected there to be any logical progression to this conversation_ , Anakin thought ruefully. He had been reassured by a small fraction when Maul hadn’t shot him, but now he took another step back, as Maul approached the monument and reached down for something that had escaped Anakin’s notice up until now.

“I was lucky enough to find this on my way in through the forest,” Maul told him, picking the item up.

It was a chunk of shaped metal at the head of a long wooden handle. An axe, of the retro variety. Anakin swallowed and twisted his body slightly, making a smaller target of himself.

“… but I’m afraid there was only the one.”

_There would be blood everywhere if he were to…_

“And just what do you think you’re going to do with that?” asked Anakin coolly.

“This town…” said Maul, glancing away and back, and away again, rapidly. “There’s something _wrong_ with it. It’s hard to explain, but… It’s not just in the Force either.”

“Didn’t you say this was a Sith – “

“I’m not making this up!” snarled Maul suddenly, before he pulled back just as quick. Almost like he was _afraid_ of Anakin in that moment.

Anakin blinked. “I never said – “

“It’s all _his_ doing. Not the town, but that _thing_. He’s the one who planned it all out. Why did you come here anyway?”

_Why did I… what?_

_Oh yeah,_ Anakin thought. _I forgot he’s a complete nutjob._

It irked him, more than the cool, controlled (before that one moment, right at the end…) demeanour of Dooku ever had, this instability of Maul’s. It made Obi-Wan feel sorry for him, and after what he’d done the bastard had _no right_ to Obi-Wan’s compassion.

“He tricked me…” Maul muttered, shaking his head. “He knew I’d take it. He knew I’d follow, he always knows.” He turned again to look at Anakin, sharply, and growled, “… though it might spoil his victory to know I took _you_ here with me…”

“Who are you even talking about?” Anakin groaned. “Obi-Wan?”

“Obi-Wan…” Maul parroted, the golden irises looking distant as he spat the name out. “Yes, he too will suffer from this, though I doubt I’ll ever see it…”

He paused and turned his back to Anakin, taking two steps further into the fog. Before Anakin could decide whether or not the hilt of his saber was heavy enough to do significant damage if he used it as a club, Maul spoke again.

“Have you seen them yet?”

“Seen what?” Anakin ground out from behind clenched teeth.

Maul glanced over his shoulder at him. “You will.”

And then he took off into the fog.

“Hey, you’re not getting away that easy!” Anakin yelled after him. “Maul!”

He followed, jumping over some of the smaller monuments as he leapt further into the gloom, but Maul was lost from his sight within moments, and with a gust of wind that whistled over the tombstones Anakin could no longer hear those metal legs on the gravel either.

Impossible. How could he have disappeared so fast, even in this fog!?

Being unable to sense the other in any way and not liking the chances of his hilt against an axe, even a low-tech one, Anakin stopped and headed back to the gate to get his bearings. There was no sign of Maul or anyone else out on the street, and the Force remained silent.

_A hole._

_A hole in the Force, he said. But what does that even mean?_

As far as Anakin understood it the Force passed through everything that wasn’t a vacuum. It was created by all life in the universe and life sustained and was sustained by it. How could it be absent from this place? There were living things here – trees, grass, and the Force had a presence in inorganic materials too. So there had to be some kind of interference field active in this town that was messing with him, maybe something the Sith built, long ago.

What Maul had said had seemed to imply something along those lines. And if Maul had chosen to come here deliberately it would make sense this might be some ancient Sith stronghold Maul had learned about from his master. But then, why had he looked so scared? Had the Sith Master tricked him into coming here, somehow?

It seemed reasonable to assume there was something of the Dark Side about this place, and yet Anakin couldn’t feel anything at all in the Force, let alone the Dark Side. It did seem localised to this area, though – he’d still been able to feel the Force a little back at the transport and Maul had made the distinction between Obi-Wan coming to the planet and Obi-Wan coming ‘here’ –

Kriff it, the transport!

Anakin activated his communicator without any further delay. “Jesse? Jesse, can you hear me, over?”

Jesse answered, but Anakin heard more static than he did words.

“… hear you… through… well, sir.”

Shit. “Jesse, I just ran into Maul – he’s here and not looking more than a little banged up. I haven’t been able to make any contact with the locals, but…”

He struggled to find a way to describe his predicament.

“… I don’t know. I don’t think Maul could have done anything to them – not to all of them, neither of us can use the Force here and – “

“… can’t… ir. You… ot… ming through.”

“Jesse?” Anakin tried adjusting the frequency but only seemed to be able to change the pitch of the static he was getting. “Jesse, can you hear me? Jesse, stay where you are and try to set up some kind of perimeter alarm around the transport, I don’t think – ”

Then a much louder burst of static cut him off, and he flinched back from the device. But now he could hear something in the static – something strange and eerie, like an instrument that had been set on fire, and he could feel his heart begin to pound harder, as though some kind of weight in that sound was trying to make it still.

Only when there was a short lull in the burst could he make out another sound, this time coming from behind him, down the street he’d been planning to follow towards the mechanic’s. He put his hand over the communicator to muffle it and focused on what was coming out of the mist – the sound of heavy breathing. Heavy, mechanical breathing, like someone on a respirator, but it was _wrong_ … too fast, too excited, almost like a –

Anakin turned around.

_Dog._

The static continued to buzz in his hand. Anakin stopped breathing for a moment.

A creature was walking towards him out of the fog. He could hear the soft scrape of its padded feet on the road. He could see –

There were hundreds of ‘dog-like’ animals in the galaxy. This was none of them. It was large, its head coming up just below Anakin’s waist, its long muzzle filled with jagged teeth. There was… it looked like scraps of sack cloth, stapled to the creature’s neck and down one side but apart from that there was no fur, nor hide of any kind – only red, raw…

Something had burned or skinned this animal alive. And it was, alive – alive and walking toward him, panting. Anakin took a slow step back from it, and then a second. It cocked its head from side to side with sharp, unnatural movements that jarred the too-fast assisted breathing, but he couldn’t tell if it had seen him.

There were bizarre black plastic covers over its eyes, like bubbles of tar, or the eye-covers of certain helmets.

A terrible growling sound wheezed out from the creature’s throat.

Then it leapt straight for Anakin’s throat.

Anakin hit out at it with his saber-hilt before it landed and knocked it away, but it recovered and scrambled to its feet – its three feet, Anakin suddenly realised; one of its hind legs was missing. Seeing nothing around him that could help and wishing fervently that for once he’d caved in to the clones’ urging and taken a blaster with him, Anakin prayed that it wouldn’t be able to keep up with him on three legs and ran: back in the direction he’d come in from.

The creature followed, tried to pounce on him again but missed, and Anakin kept running. He almost lost the beast in the fog but at the same time had almost lost himself, and stupidly turned his flashlight back on to see if he could spot the turn he was looking for.

It must have been able to see a little, because it came running for that light. Anakin threw his arm out to try and knock it down again but he misjudged the blow, or the creature had anticipated it this time, and its jaws clamped down on his arm, the momentum carrying him backward onto the sidewalk.

Fortunately for Anakin, the creature had gotten a hold of his right arm. He could feel it, the prosthetic was designed to give him enough feeling to know when something was touching it, but its teeth couldn’t break durasteel.

That was not to say the creature didn’t have a powerful bite. Anakin yelped as it shook his arm, wrenching it painfully where the prosthetic met with the flesh, and tried to hold it away from the rest of his body so it couldn’t snap at something more vital, while at the same time dragging himself backward along the paving stones.

The ‘dog’ didn’t bark or growl again, just breathed in and out around his arm; a terrible, unnatural sound he tired to pull away from. The creature pulled back, both of them tugging at Anakin’s arm, and Anakin tried kicking it but couldn’t get a good angle…

The creature dodged one of his better kicks, abruptly letting go of his arm and lunging for his throat, but Anakin grabbed it by the neck and held it off. He squeezed to try and subdue it, as it scrabbled at him with broken nails and he stared into the black, black windows over its eyes.

_What the hell am I looking at?_

It snapped, and Anakin’s attention was drawn to its mouth, and the throat from which the horrible breathing was coming. Something was jammed in there – it looked like a circular object with a grate taking up the entire circumference of the throat –

It lunged again, and Anakin had to quickly jerk his head out of the way to avoid it biting his face. The jaws of the creature wouldn’t close properly with the grate in its mouth, but if they got around his neck then Anakin was done for. With a burst of strength he pushed the thing away, still sliding back, and something touched his shoulder.

It was the wall he’d passed by earlier – the one that was falling apart. He’d touched one of the loose bricks.

Anakin grabbed desperately for one of the bricks, closed his fingers around it, and swung it as hard as he could into the creature’s skull.

There was a sickening crack. The dog was only daunted for a couple of seconds before it went for Anakin again, but Anakin swung the brick into his head with a gasp of exertion, then struck him again even harder.

Then he grabbed the brick with both hands and smashed it down with all the strength he could give the blow, caving the creature’s skull in.

And then, he brought the brick down again, just to be sure.

Struggling to breathe, held the brick up still in case it needed more, but the creature lay there still, a mass of sickening red and pink flesh now with bone and brain matter seeping through the top of its head, a pool of blood around it growing.

_What the hell?_

_What the hell was…?_

He prodded it with the hilt of his saber, drawing the tool carefully around the eyes and mouth, confirming that the plastic-looking windows over the eyes and the metallic grate in its throat were both somehow fused into the flesh.

_This thing… it’s not…_

But then, without him touching it, there was another burst of static on his communicator and he jumped to his feet, backing away. He could hear it again – the same breathing from before – and he saw the shadow of another dog-like thing stumbling towards him in the mist.

What the hell was going on in this place!?

*~*~*~*~*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anakin got a brick! Things are looking up!
> 
> NB: I am not a science person. I read on the interwebs that zirconia is used in oxygen-detection machines, and thought it sounded plausible they might need a little bit for the life support system on the ship to function. But I could be wrong... 
> 
> Very happy to receive any questions or comments!


	3. Q3 B2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd wanted to get this up on Sunday, but NaNoWriMo makes a mockery of the plans of mere mortals like me, lol. Thank you to everyone who has read this far, left kudos, or commented.
> 
> In this chapter, Anakin decides to visit the auto shop for his beautiful vacation to Silent Hill, where he finds his first clue. Then he commits further to a life of crime and breaks into an apartment building in a quest for the system star charts. But in Silent Hill you can be sure of only one thing:
> 
> Shit's locked.

Anakin ran.

Keeping the brick from before in his right hand he dodged through the fog, and the grotesque things that attacked him.

He didn’t know what to call them. They looked like animals to a degree, but no animal could survive the wounds these things had – and they all had them. Three of the things attacked Anakin one after the other following the first, and each one had been skinned alive.

Droids of some sort, maybe? Made to look like some kind of monster from an old horror story? Like a prop for a scary holo-film? But that skull had been made of bone and there had been brain beneath for sure. Unless someone had gone to a hell of a lot of trouble for a sick prank…

_Have you seen them yet?_

_You will._

Were these things what Maul had been talking about? Maybe they were the result of some Sith experiment that had taken place on the planet long ago – but then if it was that long ago, then how could they have still been alive even now? Could it be this was the site of a more recent Sith presence then? Maul acted like he hadn’t been here before, but maybe…

The Sith Master they’d been searching for all these years? Could this be his doing?

Static from the communicator drew Anakin’s attention, and he paused briefly to listen for – yes, the terrible panting, coming from a side-alley to his left. He didn’t hesitate any longer, but ran back into the mist – since it seemed as long as he kept running, he was able to lose these things.

That was another reason to think they were droids, or at least partially machine. Every time one of them drew near the communicator began to emit that chilling static, and it only stopped when Anakin was out of range – or, in the case of the first one, when he’d caved its skull in. They must have had some kind of active transmitter inside them and it was interfering with the communicator Anakin had.

Now Anakin needed some space to think through his options. He ran for the street he hoped, from his recollection of the map, led to the mechanic’s, as it was the only place he could think to go. Not only for the items they needed to fix the ship – hopefully he’d be able to at least jury-rig up a better weapon than a kriffing brick if they weren’t keeping anything on hand there for defence.

But when he turned onto the road he’d marked from the map, he was in for a nasty shock. This wasn’t only the road with the mechanic’s on it, it was also one of the roads out of the town – one that seemed to join back up with the road Anakin had come in by. However, as Anakin neared the building he hoped was the one he was looking for, he saw something strange in the fog, the light from his flashlight seeming to cut off along the ground ahead of him.

He approached too quickly and had to throw his weight backward for balance when he almost fell off the edge of the road. He was standing on the edge of a deep chasm, the road and rock beneath it broken, like it had been hit with an ion cannon from space, and even then Anakin didn’t know if something like that could create a crater like this. It was difficult to tell in the fog.

Had there been some kind of battle here, then?

A helpful warning from his communicator and he lunged to the side just quickly enough to avoid being caught by one of the stealthier dog-creatures. Its momentum was too great for it to stop itself, and with a whimper it tumbled over the edge of the chasm and into the foggy depths below.

Holding his breath, Anakin listened as hard as he could for some kind of indication as to how far it was falling, but after the static stopped he heard nothing.

_Well, that road’s out then._

Had he had the Force on his side he might have risked going down. But not now.

Now he needed to get inside before any more of those creatures showed up. He turned to the building and ran up the path through a front parking lot to get to the door. There was only one vehicle in the lot, which was not promising: and it was a rusty old thing that strangely didn’t look at all suited to this planet’s climate. It balanced precariously on the edge of the cliff that came right up to the side of the building, and creaked ominously when Anakin passed it.

The mechanic’s, ‘ _Vis’ Auto & Repair’_, was a glass or mock-glass fronted building, one pane of whose front had had something large and heavy smashed into it, not quite getting through to the other side but putting a noticeable dent in the material and sending a mess of web-like cracks out from the epicentre. A few shards sprinkled the ground beneath.

The door, thankfully, was unlocked. There was a standard security system attached but Anakin could tell there was no power getting to this building, so it was offline. Still, since he didn’t think the skinless dog monsters could open doors, he assumed he was safer in here than he was outside.

And now he had the space to think about it. About those skinless dog-monsters.

Skinless dog-monsters and a ‘hole’ in the Force. Possibly a Sith stronghold. Maybe that of the Master who was behind the war.

A seemingly empty town that had to have been occupied recently – perhaps still was. The locals who hadn’t tried to stop them from landing here and had been evasive about why exactly they shouldn’t. Deep chasms leading down to bottomless pits in the road.

A hole in the Force, Maul had called it. That strange, awful feeling that had paralysed him on their way in.

And, not forgetting, skinless dog-monsters.

It all pointed directly toward…

… toward being too much for someone like Anakin to figure out, he thought.

Anakin sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. Thinking never had been his strong suit; he was more of a doer; (he could hear Obi-Wan groaning even now at his reaching that conclusion). _Forget the monsters_ , he told himself. _Those you can figure out later, or leave for someone else to figure out when you make your report._

Sith experiments gone wrong. There, explained. Now he needed the hyperfuel, the zirconia, and the local star charts – and preferably a better weapon. Then he could fix the ship and they could get Obi-Wan to a medical facility.

Obi-Wan…

He reached out instinctively to make sure he was still there, in the Force, but felt only the smothered feeling from before, and worse than ever. Obi-Wan could have died from that head-wound and he wouldn’t know it, would just be running around this Force-forsaken town looking for parts for nothing.

_Not nothing_ , he reminded himself, in a voice that sounded like Obi-Wan’s own. _You have duties to the Jedi and the Republic, whether Obi-Wan is alive or not. To the Chancellor, to Padme, to the men – Jesse alone is counting on you to get him the hell off this awful planet._

The last one motivated him, though he felt a lingering sickness at the thought of Obi-Wan dying. He should try to contact Jesse again, he thought. He almost opened the channel on his communicator before deciding to see if he could find what he needed first.

The front room was mostly empty; a reception desk, a few chairs, a fake plant. A fake plant with a sachet of small bacta patches thrown into the pot, that was _weird,_ but he pocketed them anyway, seeing that they might come in handy. There were two doors on the far side of the room. One, marked ‘Office’, was jammed shut, but the other opened and led into the main shop.

This was a wide, open space, but with no power the lights were non-functional, and the darkness was almost as oppressive as the fog outside. This, plus there was an unpleasant burning smell lingering in the room. Anakin swung his flashlight over the almost completely empty shop, noting a number of long shelves that were mostly bare, with empty boxes in places that gave the impression the place had been ransacked.

He found a few canisters with a universal hyperfuel symbol on their sides, but his relief was short lived – they were all empty.

_Of course,_ he thought. _Why would the hyperfuel canisters have hyperfuel in them? That’s just plain silly…_

The Force was smothered, but there was still a prickling at the back of his neck, and he moved on.

At the far end of the shop, on the right, his light fell upon the only actual vehicle in the room. It was a large hovercar, certainly not going to reach hyperspace any time soon, or go anywhere other than right where it was, for that matter. The engine compartment had been pulled open and smashed with a large, old-fashioned wrench that was still stuck in the circuitry.

Some of the cathodes had been irreparably shattered, and it didn’t look like there were any replacements in the shop, so using the hovercar to get around was out of the question, but Anakin grabbed the large, heavy wrench and wrenched it out of the car’s innards.

_Better than a brick_ , at least, he decided.

However, when he tossed his brick aside it landed with a strange, soft smacking noise that made him wince even before he moved his flashlight around to see what it had hit.

There was a dead body lying under one side of the car.

Anakin inhaled sharply and whirled his flashlight around to check for danger, but he saw nothing, and with a second glance at the corpse he didn’t expect to. The man – he thought it was a man; human, tall, lean and well-built when he’d been alive by the look of it – had been burned beyond recognition – his head and hands all charred red clumps poking out of clothes that seemed bizarrely untouched – its lower half obscured by the vehicle.

The body was stiff, locked into a pose of agony propped up on one elbow with its other arm thrown in front of its face as if to try and protect it. He must have been redressed and posed like that, Anakin thought; yet it didn’t seem like the kind of thing Maul would do. Kill a random mechanic for no reason, sure, he’d do that, but play around with the corpse afterward? Plus, the guy hadn’t been killed with an axe.

Skinless dogs surely wouldn’t have done this either. What the hell else was running around this place?

As he circled the grisly spectacle slowly, Anakin’s light reflected off of something in the corpse’s left hand, closed in a fist whose fingers were fused together with heat. Grimacing, Anakin knelt down beside the body – breathing through his mouth since he now knew where the burning smell was coming from – and hesitantly used the wrench to push the hand towards himself.

It moved with a series of sickening cracking noises. Anakin had to use his hands to pry the fist open, with nothing but the corner of his robes to cover them, holding the flashlight in his teeth.

“Sorry, pal,” he muttered to the dead man.

A key wrapped in a scrap of bloody paper fell out of its opened hand. An old key – just shaped metal. The paper was extremely wrinkled, but the writing on it was legible.

_That ASSHOLE took the star charts home with him. Probly going to try and copy them – the IDIOT. This is the key to his blokk and its on you to get them back before tommorow. Anyone who has anything to do with someone trying to leeve the sistym and the old crone will litrerlly BURN THEM ALIVE!!!_

_Guess that’s not an exaggeration_ , thought Anakin, looking again at the burned man. He looked for longer than he should have, perhaps, suddenly thinking of those he’d known who’d died from the same cause. Usually an explosion that left a lot less than this, but not always.

They were one with the Force, Obi-Wan would tell him. But…

Anyway, he’d best be on the lookout for whatever ‘old crones’ might be running around this place, burning people and posing their bodies. At least he had a possible location for one of the things they needed.

There was something engraved on the head of the key that had been in the man’s hand:

Q3. B2.

Anakin checked it against the map to see if he could identify where the ‘blokk’ might be. Sure enough, there were four sections, not immediately labelled in the holo-display but when he queried them the designators Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4 popped right up.

‘Q3’ was on the north-west side of town; from the look of it, Anakin could get there with only a single turn to make if he picked the right one. He switched from display to communicator.

“Jesse? Jesse, come in – over.”

At first there was nothing but static. Then –

“… you, sir? Sir, can… ear me… ver?”

“Jesse?” Anakin fiddled with the frequency. “Jesse, can you hear me, over?”

“You’re coming through clear, sir,” Jesse replied, and Anakin breathed an audible sigh of relief. “Are you all right, over?”

“I’m fine. How much did you hear of what I said earlier – did you catch that Maul is running about the place, over?”

“I heard that part, sir. There was a perimeter field set-up on board, but its range is lousy.”

Anakin winced. “Better than nothing. Listen, Jesse, Maul’s not the only thing we have to worry about. I’m starting to think this was some kind of stronghold for mad Sith science; there are things running around here that…”

Skinless dog monsters. Mutilated moving animal corpses. Things that couldn’t be real – _had_ to be a trick somehow.

“… I don’t know. Some kind of genetic experiments; either way, they’re dangerous.”

“Sir, do you need backup, over?”

Although his instinct was to keep Jesse far away from this place, the fact that the Force was suppressed and Jesse at the very least would be carrying a blaster meant that he’d probably be more use here than Anakin.

However, they were on a clock with who knew how much time left on it when it came to Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan couldn’t be left unconscious on the transport with nothing but a simple med-droid for protection. Not with Maul out there.

“No, you stay with Obi-Wan. I have a lead on where I can find the local star charts; hopefully I won’t have to stay out here too long.”

“And the droid?”

_Fuck, Artoo_! Anakin’s heart skipped a beat before he remembered: Artoo could fly to safety if he was attacked, and the dog things’ ‘warning’ was probably something he’d pick up on as soon as they were within range. If Artoo could handle gundarks, which he could, he could probably handle this.

“I sent him to the local med-centre, to see if he could find any help for Obi-Wan – equipment, if not an actual doctor, and I don’t think he will find one of those. This place is all but deserted.”

“Understood.” Jesse paused before continuing. “Sir… if you think… ‘s too dangerous, maybe y… uld come back to the ship. She’s not spaceworthy but she could go elsewhere on the planet when… pairs are done, and there are other settlements.”

Settlements Anakin had probably been an idiot not to aim for in the first place. And apart from their not knowing how far they could trust the locals, what Jesse suggested made sense.

On the other hand, it would take hours for the ship to be repaired even if Anakin and Artoo were there, and didn’t it make sense for him to use those hours to search for what they needed to get back to Republic space? Anakin could handle the dogs despite being without the Force, and as for Maul…

Maul hadn’t attacked him. Not even after Ahsoka had said Anakin was his new target. Maybe he thought he couldn’t win and was going to try and lure him into a trap, but maybe something else was going on.

Maybe there was a clue here, as to who the Sith Master was?

“… I’m going to at least see if I can get those star charts,” he said eventually. “And if you’ve finished the repairs as best you can and I’m not back or you haven’t heard from me then you should try and take the transport to another settlement.”

“Sir…”

“You can always come back for me later, Jesse.”

“Sir, Rex… ‘d demote me to janitorial staff, if I was _lucky_.”

Anakin grinned. “It’s an order, Jesse.”

“If I was unlucky, he’d have me grow my hair out so the janitorial staff could flip me upside-down and use me as a mop for the rest of the war.”

“Yeah, but what’ll Cody do to you if you hang around waiting for me while General Kenobi needs medical attention?”

“Nnng…” was clearly Jesse’s way of saying he had a point there.

“Besides, the war won’t last much longer now Dooku’s gone,” _murdered_ – “Good soldiers follow orders, Jesse.” _Do it._

Suddenly a wave of nauseous dizziness came over Anakin, and whatever Jesse said in reply was swallowed up by the static. In his head, that last sentence echoed beneath the high-pitched whine of another change in the air pressure, and he brought his hands up to his head trying to shake off the unpleasant sound.

_Good soldiers follow orders._

_Good soldiers follow orders._

_Good soldiers follow orders._

Why had he said that just now? It was maybe the kind of thing he’d say to one of his men as a joke, but there and then it didn’t feel like a joke.

Wasn’t it something like that… that had been said…

The lights flickered above him and he took the opportunity to scan the room in case one of those things had got in and was causing the static, but the room was empty as far as he could tell. He started moving back towards the door in the hopes that getting out of the darkness would help, and as the static let up a little he increased his speed.

_Something must be wrong with the atmosphere of this place_ , he thought. _Artoo didn’t detect anything on our way in to town, but it could be more localised than just the town. Maybe I should just go back to the transport._

Anakin stumbled back into the reception area, blinking against the sudden change in light, and for a few moments he held onto the front desk for balance. A deep exhale and the edges of his vision went fuzzy, but his heart rate and hearing went back to normal abruptly, leaving him with only a small headache.

The comm was still blaring static – choppy, like Jesse was trying to say something to him on the other end, but this time trying to alter the frequency didn’t help and Anakin was left sighing.

“Jesse, if you can hear me, my last order stands. I’m going to make for those charts and contact you again when I have them. Watch out for yourself while I’m gone. Over and out.”

He lowered his wrist. If there was something in the air it might have been localised to that shop, and going back outside should have taken care of it. He hoped.

_I’m probably being an idiot about this, as usual_. He peered out of the glass storefront at the fog, which had not gotten any thinner in the last few minutes. _But there’s something about this place…_

Possible Sith stronghold, and recently so. There may have been clues in this town that warranted his staying to investigate, at least as much as he could to get the parts he needed. Obi-Wan might have even thought it more important than getting himself medical attention. Dooku was gone, yes, but the Sith Master…

There didn’t seem to be any of the creatures close enough to the door to get him. He checked the map once more, committed his route to memory and left the mechanic’s at a run.

*~*~*~*~*~*

Anakin was attacked by four of the dogs in as many minutes as he ran, evading each one until he reached the block of buildings labelled Q3. And he hoped, against hope perhaps, that some of those had been the same dogs that had attacked him before, otherwise he hated to think just how many of the things were running around town.

Q3, on the map, covered an area consisting of four large, square structures each of them six storeys high and longer than they were tall. The first one he passed had a glass plate fixed by the door with ‘B3’ etched on its surface in bold letters.

There was a mural beneath of cartoonish flowers, paint chipped and colours dimmed with age. Anakin almost slowed down.

_Living quarters_ , he decided, running for the next block. The main entrance was around on the other side, and as he turned the corner there was static on his comm again. Anakin stopped himself hastily, just in time for a blur of red and black to run past where he would have been otherwise. He ran a wide berth around it as it turned, towards the door to the building.

‘B2’ said a metal plate with two long, almost parallel scratches straight across its surface. But this last dog was still on Anakin’s tail.

_Great_ , he thought. He could have run on and circled back after he lost it, but time was of the essence. Key in hand he came to the door and tried to jam the metal into the lock only to catch it on part of the internal mechanism and catch it again when he tried to jam it in harder.

“Come on…” he muttered.

That was all the time he had before the dog snarled through its horrible, mechanical breathing and lunged for him again. Anakin swung the old wrench out at it and smashed it against the side of the creature’s head. It flew off-course with a yelp; something cracked, and two sharp fangs fell out onto the road in a spatter of blood.

Anakin tried pushing the key in again to no avail, and finally turned it upside-down, whereupon it at last went all the way in. That was just when the dog found itself recovered enough to go for him again, and as the key wouldn’t turn properly either – _stupid kriffing ancient piece of crap!_ – Anakin was still locked outside with it.

In frustration he left the key in the lock and went to confront the thing head-on, using the same swings he would for Djem-So adjusted for the shorter reach of his current weapon. Two blows to the head sent the dog reeling, staggering about on the road, but it was still trying to come after him – wheezing horribly through the grate in its throat, and Anakin approached it again.

_Sorry, whatever you are._

He brought the wrench down with all his strength and smashed through its skull, leaving the brain matter dripping from the rusted tool. The creature gave a final, awful screech as it died, and Anakin hesitated beside it until the static from his communicator had faded to nothing.

The shade of a familiar, empty feeling shuddered through him, and he turned back to the door.

_From now on, I should probably kill them whenever I can_ , he thought, _and remove them as a threat. From the look of them I’d only be putting them out of their misery._

Only the Sith could have come up with something like that.

With a glance back he resumed working on getting the door open. Eventually, with much wiggling and having to use his right hand when it came to turning it to contend with the rust, the door swung forward.

_Should have just smashed the window with the wrench and broken in_ , Anakin thought with annoyance.

Quarter 3, Block 2 was a dingy building, its entrance barely lit with emergency lighting. There was a simple floor plan drawn on the wall on Anakin’s right; numbered boxes representing what must have been small, cramped apartments not much bigger than where Anakin had lived with his mother on Tatooine. There were twenty-eight of these on each floor, two parallel corridors with seven apartments on either side linked by a central corridor where the stairwell was, plus a basement that held communal laundry, maintenance facilities and a generator.

It looked cheap, constructed hastily and meant as temporary accommodation – such as that for a year-long research posting, or something – but this had been used long past what it had been built for. Durasteel had been mixed in with poorer quality alloy for some things, like the doors, which were sporting as much rust as that keyhole, and no one had bothered to clad or carpet anything for aesthetic purposes, so much of the construction method was plainly visible. The walls looked sturdy enough for what they were, but some of the bolts holding them together were degraded to the point of staining black.

Anakin took this all in briefly before he approached door 1.1 – which, unsurprisingly, did not open for him. This lock was slot-shaped, so it would have needed a card. A small red light in the corner showed that the locks were still receiving power, and though Anakin probably could have hacked his way in in time, he didn’t want to have to do that for every single door in the building.

As he stood there, going over his options, a sudden noise from inside the apartment caught his attention. When he pressed his ear right up close he could make out a scratching noise – weird, not like an animal trapped inside or anything, more like… a machine that had been left on. But he didn’t know what kind of machine could or would make such a noise.

With a shrug, he banged his fist on the door. “Hello? Is there someone in there?”

The scratching stopped.

Then Anakin heard sounds of movement, coming closer to him, and the communicator on his wrist began to emit static again. At first his eyes darted around in case there was a dog inside the building, but seeing nothing approaching from either end of the corridor or those connecting he turned to the door to 1.1 and backed away slowly.

The static stopped. But there was that scratching noise again, coming right at the other side of the door, and a few loud, slow thumps followed – at about Anakin’s head-height. Then a scoring, scorching sound, and he saw a green light flash behind the door.

_Okay,_ he thought. _I’m going to leave that one for now._

He might have rethought the apartment plan entirely but out of the corner of his eye he saw the lock on the door at the end of the corridor had a green light on it instead of a red. Opposite 1.1, 1.7 also had a red light, as did 1.2 adjacent – but 1.3, 1.5 and 1.6 had no lights on their locks, and Anakin guessed that since power was still coming in those lights must have burnt out.

1.4, the one door with the green light, was his next port of call. With a brief once over he used a mini-driver to pull the casing off the lock and one glance at the wiring confirmed his hope – this lock was in ‘open’ mode, he just needed to pull down the internal lever.

The door opened.

Inside, the main room was completely lightless, and Anakin tapped the flashlight pinned to his robes for illumination. It was a dingy space, the door opening straight out into the main reception room that was only big enough for a table that might have sat five at a stretch, a few shelves, and a two-seater settee. There was also a screen set into the wall that by the looks of it had come with the building.

That in itself was unusual, and Anakin had a bad feeling when he noticed there was no on-off switch to be seen.

A kitchen area separated from the main with a pair of waist-high counters was stained with black mould, and without thinking Anakin pulled the refrigeration unit’s door open, finding nothing but a couple of empty bottles and another sachet of bacta patches, which he pocketed. There was no date on the packet, but expired bacta was hardly going to kill him.

The cupboards were either empty or had maybe a few, measly bits of crockery and a couple of ration packets that he did not touch. In the reception room the shelves weren’t any more helpful – nothing on them but an ugly porcelain bantha figurine.

To the right of the front door a corridor led off towards a small bedroom with a single cot, wardrobe of plain, dark clothes, and a desk with empty drawers. A second door at the end of that corridor opened to a small fresher, and more black mould.

Finally, a door just beyond the kitchen led into a larger bedroom, with a double bed and more empty furniture. The only thing the room sported other than clothes and bedsheets was a framed picture on the wall that had all but disintegrated with age and some kind of battery in the drawer of a bedside table.

Power pack, Anakin decided after a few moments of scrutiny. For a blaster of some kind. Old, but still usable. Since it was small, he took it with him.

That was apartment 1.4 in its entirety. Anakin left with the feeling that whoever had once lived here had departed in a hurry. It would have explained why the place was almost bare, but for a few small things still lying around. But even though he couldn’t help a little curiosity at what might have caused the former occupants to flee, he found himself rubbing his brow with a feeling of intense frustration as he left.

_I’m wasting my time. Obi-Wan could be bleeding out into his brain right now, and I’m rifling through drawers in a long-abandoned apartment trying to find star charts when I don’t even know what they’re stored on. There are… a hundred and sixty-eight apartments in this block, plus the basement, and that’s assuming they even are still here._

_Who knows how long it’s been?_

_I should go back to the ship and help Jesse with the repairs._

(the Force was muffled, but something told him he wouldn’t be able to go back to the ship just like that anymore)

He stood there for a while, a feeling of… of… a feeling of something bad, building and building until he felt like punching the wall. He couldn’t think properly.

_You’re tired_ , a voice that sounded more like Obi-Wan’s than his own reminded him. _You had barely more than two hours to rest on the journey to Mandalore and you’ve been jumping from battle to battle for days. Plus, you also have a head wound._

_You need to rest._

“It’s just a bump. I need to find us a way out of here so we can get _you_ some proper medical attention,” Anakin muttered.

He took a deep breath.

“I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me.”

… and sighed.

“Except not, because the Force is being blocked off in this place.”

Breathing deeply again he tried to imagine what Obi-Wan would say in this situation. Probably that the Force was not ‘blocked’ in this place, that was impossible, it was only in his mind that it had been obscured by whatever strange power existed here. He needed to have faith, therefore, that the Force was still with him – though what use that would be if he couldn’t use it, was escaping him for now.

But then, maybe he could work through whatever was keeping him from feeling the Force? He still had his instincts to go on, and those had been some of the first ways the Force had communicated to him, even if he hadn’t known it at the time. Things like when to move in a podrace, or how to approach certain customers who came to the shop, or –

_He reached out to a durasteel door in the sweltering hallway, but pulled his hand back a moment later. There was a hand on his shoulder._

_“Listen, little Ani. Before we go down, I should tell you something.”_

Anakin shook his head. What a strange memory to come to him so vividly just then. Though he supposed…

… he supposed he should check which doors were open first, before he committed himself to restoring full power so he could hack the mainframe and open them all. He’d waste a lot more time going through that if the charts were in an already unlocked apartment, than he would having to re-tread a few flights of stairs if they weren’t.

So he unscrewed the covers on the locks of 1.3, 1.5 and 1.6, but only 1.6 opened when he pressed down on the latch. 1.6 was a smaller apartment than 1.4, the kitchen area taking up a wall of the front room with a similar table, settee, shelf and wall-embedded screen to the first apartment, and an old rug, stained and tattered. Again, the shelves and cupboards had little to offer, and this time the fridge was locked – with a mechanism that Anakin judged to be controlled from the basement.

_Slave quarters_ , his instinct told him. He remembered business partners of Watto’s on Tatooine who had chided him as an ‘irresponsible owner’ for allowing Shmi and Anakin to keep food – the little he’d deigned to give them – in their quarters. This was a Sith-controlled planet, or at least this part of it was. This was where they housed their slaves.

Through his welling fury, the thought yet occurred: _But how is that possible? This place surely hasn’t been abandoned that long?_

Maybe others had come in the interim and housed slaves here. This could have been some kind of smugglers’ hideout, among other things.

He moved on. There was one door opposite the front that led into a cramped hall with a flickering light. Opposite that was a door to another disgusting bathroom, while on the right was a storage space, in this case storing nothing but the mummified bodies of a family of some type of pest; two adults and two juveniles. On the left was the door that led to the bedroom, and another big nothing.

As he was leaving, however, he happened to spot a glint on the floor near the wall when his flashlight flew over it. On closer inspection it was a scratch in the metal – a series of scratches, in fact, next to a cheap metal locker that had been used as a wardrobe. Curiously, Anakin pushed the locker along where the floor was scratched.

A horrible scraping noise sent shudders down his spine. If he had hoped the movement was indicative of a secret hiding place he might have found the star charts in, he was disappointed. The only thing the locker had been hiding was more scratch marks on the wall.

I HATE PHANTI

I HATE ZEALL

I HATE PHANTI

I HATE ZEALL

I HATE PHANTI

I HATE ZEALL

I HATE PHANTI

I HATE ZEALL

On and on the same words went, from top to bottom in rows of sharp, tiny letters. Just ‘I hate Phanti, I hate Zeall’, over and over again. Anakin’s right hand traced over a few lines. ‘Phanti’ and ‘Zeall’.

_The masters_ , he thought. Sith?

Seemed likely.

But it wasn’t going to help him get Obi-Wan off the planet.

Anakin left the locker where it was and walked out of 1.6, heading for the other end of the corridor. Although five of the lights on the locks had burned out on this side, he checked each to find only one was for an unlocked door – the other two were red.

Unfortunately, 1.13 had nothing more remarkable inside it than a bottle of red liquid and two wine-glasses set out on its stained table. Anakin moved on.

To get to the other side of the building Anakin had to go through the corridor that led to the stairwell. This door opened at the touch of a button, thankfully, but as soon as it did he saw another problem.

“… you’ve got to be kidding me,” he groaned.

The stairs were perfectly accessible. But although the door was already open to the other side of the building where apartments 1.15 to 1.28 were, there was a grid of light red energy blocking the path. Anakin hadn’t even noticed before that the doorways had field emitters in them!

_Well, there’s fourteen I can cross off my list before I have to try and get the power back on_ , he thought with annoyance. That made it three out of twenty-eight that were accessible on this floor, and the star charts could have been in any one of the other twenty-five if they were even still in the building!

Gingerly, he approached the field, turning his wrench around so he could probe it with the insulated handle. The field crackled, pushing back against him, and a thread of smoke rose from the handle along with an acrid smell. However, it didn’t straight up melt.

_So I won’t dice myself to pieces if I fall against it, but it will be a nasty shock and I can’t force my way through._ He sighed _. Second floor it is, then._

The stairwell, rather stupidly, was not adequately lit with the emergency power. Anakin jogged up the metal steps, pausing only briefly when he heard something fall over from beneath – on the basement level. After he’d shrugged that off he turned the corner to get to the top of the first flight and onto the second level.

This corridor had no protective measures in place on either end, and Anakin decided to go left first, coming into the corridor that held the doors to apartments 2.15 to 2.28.

2.15 had a green light on its lock and Anakin opened it to find a room with an identical layout to 1.6 and probably every other apartment in the building that wasn’t on an end position. This apartment was worse than the others though, with more soft furnishings that had badly decayed, and some kind of grit on the floor in the hall that scraped between his boots and the metal beneath them.

In the bedroom, there was something that made him stop still.

Standing in the centre of the room, facing the door, was a headless mannequin in Jedi robes.

Anakin’s mind flew to Dooku and the look that had been on his face before that face had been rolling along the floor. A sharp pain flared in his wound, and as if of its own accord his right arm brought the wrench up in front of him, like he thought he needed to fend off an attacker.

The mannequin was still, and in a few seconds his eyes had focused more on it beneath the harsh light of the flashlight. Then his heart rate began to make that slow climb down to normal.

From what he knew of the man, Dooku would never have worn these robes even when he had been a Jedi. They were old and threadbare, repaired in several places by an amateurish hand, possibly in the worst condition Anakin had ever seen on a set of robes. These ones were cream, with brown over, much like the ones Obi-Wan… would…

The wrench was shaking in his hand. As he reached out with it to probe the garment he saw a few grains of sand fall from them, sprinkling the dirty floor below. All this sand – the grit he’d felt from earlier, how had –

There was something in the robe’s pocket. Anakin reached in and pulled it out – a metal disc with a circuit board on one side and on the other a crude embossing of a Jedi figure; robes, lightsaber in one hand, old-style book in the other. Tiny letters around the edge spelled out:

THE KNIGHT

_Okay…_ thought Anakin. _Weird. I don’t think it’s a storage device. Still, maybe I should take it with me._

He put the disc inside one of the compartments in his sleeves, but as he turned the wrench caught on the edge of the displayed robes and pulled a loose thread. Before Anakin realised what was happening the motion dragged the entire top half of the mannequin – apparently just balanced on the bottom – off and sent it tumbling to the ground with a loud clatter.

Anakin jumped back in shock, and then the bottom half fell over too. Without thinking, he ripped the wrench free of the thread it had caught on and let the robe fall to the ground in a heap before he backed into the doorway, staring.

What the hell…

Why…

He stalled. Something about that pile of cloth and the broken mannequin turned his stomach. He could smell something burning, and it seemed like it was coming from inside the pile.

Anakin turned right round and left the apartment in about a half-dozen long strides, smoothing a lock of hair behind his ear to try and compose himself. It was ridiculous to be affected by something like that, he told himself. Absolutely –

Static burst out from him communicator as soon as he crossed the threshold. At once he raised the wrench, expecting one of the skinless dog monsters to come bounding out of the darkness, but instead there was a flash of green light and the feeling of something hot zooming past his cheek.

A laser blast left a scorch mark on the corner of the opposite corridor towards the fire escape, coming from behind Anakin – the corridor containing the stairwell. He leapt further down the one he was stuck in but the quarters were tight and not at all conducive to close combat.

Seconds later, something stumbled out from the stairwell.

This creature – if it could be called that – was closer to human than to dog-shaped, but this was definitely a droid of some sort. It had to be.

Staggering on primitive, ill-fitting legs the droid looked incomplete, huge sections of its torso, shoulders and thigh missing, which was throwing it entirely off balance. Its metal parts were black, but it was also… _encrusted_ , in places, with chunks of bloody flesh that dripped onto the ground or hung off it in strings from some parts.

In others, growing out of the enormous cavity in its chest, along its back and neck, and the inside of its upper leg were pale crystals like the stalagmites of Ilum, some obelisks, others more lumpy, liquid-looking.

The creature’s head was spherical, mostly – the sphere cracked with flesh and crystals spilling out of it – with a line dividing it into two halves, and it had a smaller circle indented on the upper half from which another laser blast fired in Anakin’s direction in the moment it took him to take all this in.

“Shit!” Anakin hissed, diving to the side. There wasn’t much space to go, but he managed to avoid the blast.

The parts of the creature screeched against each other like nails on a chalkboard with every movement. Anakin didn’t pause to mull over his situation any longer and swung forward with the wrench and all his strength, putting a huge dent in the – for lack of a better term – ‘head’ before it could aim its laser at him again.

He followed up hard and fast, with a series of brutal strikes, trying not to cringe at the squelch that happened when he hit meat instead of metal. The droid swiped out at him with its pitiful arms but Anakin dodged back before lunging forward into another strike that finally brought the thing down.

And then another one came around the corner and fired at him.

Anakin moved his head out of the way at the last second, but the beam caught his shoulder before it seared a line up the wall behind him. The pain was sharp, but served to give him a boost of adrenaline, as he lunged forward, dropping down to sweep the second droid off its feet with a whirling kick before attacking its head.

But now he was in a conundrum, as the first droid started to get up. Anakin struck as many desperate blows to the second one as he could before scooting back out of the way of another laser blast from the first, into the corridor that led to the fire escape. The thing followed, but Anakin was out of its line of ‘sight’ for a moment and this confused it.

His uppercut with the wrench when it came after him into the corridor seemed to catch it by complete surprise, giving Anakin the time to knock it to the ground and rail on its head with another. Two. Three. Four –

The sphere cracked, its crystals shattering – red liquid pouring out like he’d smashed a bottle of it inside the thing’s head. He stepped back in shock and disgust, which proved to be fortunate as it meant he dodged another blast from the second droid as it climbed to its feet. Anakin launched himself forward and this time simply grabbed the thing’s legs out from under it.

Its head banged against the wall as it fell, and this seemed to disorient it, as it flailed like it was malfunctioning. Anakin drove his weapon down against its skull again and again until he heard a second terrible crack.

The static on his communicator stopped.

Anakin gasped for breath, pointing his flashlight in every direction so he could be sure nothing else was coming. As he centred himself as best he could without being able to access the Force he stared down at the two droids, lying in their pools of blood.

What the hell…

What the ever-loving…

_The dogs aren’t the only_ things _running around Silent Hill. And yet…_

The more he stared, the less it made sense. Maybe it was just the light but Anakin prided himself on knowing his droids and these… it wasn’t that they were unfamiliar. It was that they shouldn’t have worked. The parts… the configuration… the missing pieces and the pieces that were there but shouldn’t have been… they shouldn’t have moved at all, let alone walked.

_I should get out of here_ , he thought. _This place is wrong – we should take our chances on another part of the planet. Obi-Wan is counting on me. I want him to be able to count on me._

But Anakin headed towards the fire escape, not the stairwell. Maybe to get out into the daylight sooner, maybe an instinct pulled him there, but it was locked – and judging by that lock it needed an old key of shaped metal like the front entrance.

Then Anakin turned back around, and with the stairwell corridor doors open he had a clear view all the way to the fire escape on the other side of the building.

Beneath the red, emergency lights there was another figure standing, perfectly still.

Anakin stopped breathing.

Something else started.

He couldn’t make out the figure clearly from this far away. It wore black, black armour by the look of the meagre red light glinting off it, with a long, black cape. Its helmet had a face like a skull. He heard it breathing, even over such a distance.

In-out.

In-out.

In-out.

Anakin took a step closer, even as he screamed at himself not to do so. There was something…

… familiar…

…

The lights suddenly flickered all around him, and dazed by the flash he covered his eyes with his arm.

When he looked again, the figure had vanished.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A wild Darth Vader has appeared!
> 
> ... wait, how does that make any sense?!
> 
> I mentioned in a few comments that there's a nod to the inspiration for this story in this chapter. Just before lockdown I had the good fortune to visit the Kimono exhibition at the V&A in London. I was getting through Clone Wars at the time on the recommendation of a friend, and was therefore surprised (a welcome one, of course) to see the original Obi-Wan Kenobi costume from A New Hope was part of the exhibition and on display at the museum. So, like Anakin, I also saw Ben's robes on a mannequin - although in better condition than the set I described above and without any weird coins in the pocket. 
> 
> Oh, spoilers... the Jedi robes Anakin sees on the mannequin are supposed to be Ben's. Sorry if that didn't come across... Hope to see you next time!


	4. The Sith Master

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to get this up yesterday, but unfortunately it was Friday the 13th, and Jason Voorhees broke into my flat and went through this chapter, adding a whole bunch of typos while I was in the shower. Hope I got all of them...
> 
> In this chapter, Anakin reaches a conclusion about who it was he saw at the end of Ch. 3, finds some more collectibles, has a surprisingly helpful conversation and then encounters a strange new character...
> 
> I hope everyone enjoys, and thank you to all who are reading, or have left kudos, and especially to those of you who've left your thoughts so far!

*~*~*~*

_You must leave._

_You must stay._

These two thoughts beat against the inside of Anakin’s head simultaneously as he continued to search the apartments for the star charts.

In the bathroom of 2.18, Anakin clipped his flashlight to the rail of the mouldy shower curtain so he could check the wound from the… droid… thing, in the mirror. There was just about enough of the mirror not scratched over to accomplish this.

The wound was actually not as bad as he might have expected. It hurt, that was for sure, and along the thin centre of the mark the burn was at least third degree, but it was a small line, and he might have expected a laser of that size to slice right through the bone and the wall behind it depending on the maker.

Although water ran from the tap, he didn’t trust it on his wounds, sufficing to slap a couple of bacta patches on the burn and put his tunic back on. He frowned at himself in the mirror as he did so. He looked thin.

But it was probably just the light.

A few minutes of playing with the frequency on his communicator and he had to accept that he wasn’t going to make contact with Jesse any time soon. Tired, he sat down on the settee in the lounge and slumped back.

What the hell _was_ this place?

And what was that _thing_ he’d seen at the end of the hallway?

That… being, that had been out of place, somehow. Well, everything here was out of place but that thing was out of step with reality as Anakin knew it and with the rest of the Silent Hill he’d seen so far, and he didn’t know how he’d come to that conclusion, but there it was. A feeling. 

The armoured figure had also been familiar somehow. Like he’d seen him in a dream before. Indeed: ‘Him’, he seemed like, rather than ‘it’ – rather than ‘her’ even, though he hadn’t forgotten that there might be an ‘old crone’ running about the place burning people alive. But this was a ‘man’ of his dreams. And Anakin didn’t think they’d been good dreams either – not that his dreams often were.

A vision, then? Not like the ones he’d had about his mother – _slaughtered them like_ – if he was only remembering it now that he’d seen a glimpse, or an image, of this… person.

Had they actually been there? The image had disappeared so quickly Anakin was tempted to say no, except for – well, another feeling. But if this guy was here, on this planet, and if Maul’s former master, the Sith Master, had been hanging around this place – and if it was Anakin’s destiny, as he kept being told it was, to face said Sith Master, then maybe…

The Sith Master? Could he be here _now_? The man in black?

_Then you must stay_ , he could imagine Obi-Wan telling him.

_Why, because this is the reckoning I was supposedly born for? Here and now?_ He supposed it made some sense, what with the Sith Apprentice having just been killed – _terrified eyes rolling along the floor_ – but…

… he hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye. He’d caught Padme’s eye across the senate floor, her looking at him first with joy and then with urgency, like there was something she really needed to tell him, but then Maul had escaped and Anakin couldn’t leave Ahsoka and Rex to face him by themselves now that the Chancellor was safe. Not that _murderer_ , who’d caused his master so much pain.

He hadn’t had more than a mission update and warning from Ahsoka when they’d spoken, had only shared a casual greeting with Rex. A brief thanks and well-wishing from the Chancellor, in front of so many others he couldn’t have been anything but formal. And Obi-Wan had been unconscious when he left him.

_And could die_ , he reminded himself.

_That doesn’t matter_ , Obi-Wan would have said. _Nor does anything else that’s on your mind. If the Sith Master is here, you have the duty to face him, and bring him to justice._

_Or die trying_ , Anakin thought – and, to be honest, had always thought. And that would mean…

_Well, if I do manage to take him down with me, then at least they’ll all be safe. That’s more important than something like ‘getting to say goodbye’._

_And at least if I die…_

He thought of bringing his saber down over and over in the firelight on that dark, desert night. Chancellor Palpatine had told him then that he had to remain on the Jedi path regardless because he would go on to do something great, important, special – and maybe the Chancellor was right.

A final showdown with the Sith.

Anakin took a deep breath and stood up, slapping his knees with the finality of a decision made. Whatever happened, Jesse and Obi-Wan would need those star charts to get back to Republic space, so if the Sith Master was watching him, then he may as well make himself useful until the bastard decided to strike.

_And Obi-Wan won’t die_ , he told himself. _As long as I defeat the Sith Master, Obi-Wan won’t die._

“I am one with the Force,” he muttered, “and the Force is with me.”

Even if he couldn’t feel it, he imagined Obi-Wan nodding at him in approval and that, at least, made him feel a little better.

There was nothing else of any use in 2.18, so Anakin headed for the door. Before he left he held his communicator up to it to see if he could hear any static, but there was none.

Not until he actually opened the door – then it started immediately.

At the other end of the corridor there was a third droid-thing. It had been facing away from him, but must have sensed him somehow because it whirled around as soon as he appeared. Then it moved almost eagerly, and Anakin saw its ‘eye’ line up – it fired, and he dodged. The first two had fired at him enough that seeing it move in that specific way had become a tell.

_And there’s always a recharge period too_ , he thought. _Sorry, Sith Master, but you’re going to have to do better than throwing a few of these things at me._

Anakin rushed forward, zig-zagging as best he could in the narrow space and jumping over the bodies of the ones he’d already dispatched. He reached the droid just as it was ready to fire again and smashed the wrench up into its head so that the beam of green light went up into the ceiling before striking it from the side.

It was knocked off-balance, and Anakin took the opportunity to kick its legs out from under it. A few more well-placed blows down onto the sphere and it cracked, blood pouring out at Anakin’s feet. As the pool spread, the static on his communicator faded away.

_Simple enough_ , he thought, as he backed up. _Now, let’s see what’s in the rest of these rooms_.

There were three other unlocked doors in the second-floor east corridor. In 2.20 there was barely anything of note; one wall was covered in empty picture frames from ceiling to floor and there were stacks of them in the storage cupboard and bedroom. The fridge had a number of odd cans with stamps in an unfamiliar language stocked inside.

In Basic, each one had scrawled on it in marker:

POISON! DON’T EAT!!

_Okay, then – I won’t_ , thought Anakin.

If these really had been slave quarters then Anakin suspected that, to the mind of whoever had been housed in this apartment at least, their rations had had something unpleasant inside them. In his experience drugging slaves to make them more docile was rare, as it made them worse workers, but certain steroids were another matter.

Not so much on Tatooine, where it was much more difficult to get good quality drugs – or anything else of ‘quality’, for that matter – but it happened.

The cupboards in the kitchen area were equally chock-full of the same cans, and Anakin imagined it had been difficult for the former occupant to find anything to eat if they hadn’t touched their rations. But they must have managed somehow.

He hoped they’d got away in the end. Without the Force to hint otherwise, he could allow himself that wish.

2.24 was next, an apartment Anakin spent as little time as he could in as it was infested with a crawling cockroach-like insectoid species that he spent an uncomfortable few minutes brushing off his clothing while he opened doors – doors to cupboards that seemed to contain nothing but the cockroaches. There was such a noise of them coming from the bathroom that in the end he didn’t even open that door.

He did notice one thing about 2.24 though; the insects that swarmed across its floors and occasionally flew across the room with a demanding buzz would not cross the threshold to the outside corridor even when the door was open. That seemed strange to Anakin, but then, he was hardly a naturalist.

The last door that was unlocked in that corridor was 2.27, and when he opened that door, the static on his communicator started.

_You’re kriffing kidding me – they’re inside the apartments too!?_

But of course, Anakin had seen that green flash of light around the edges of the doorway of the very first apartment he’d checked. Seeing nothing in the brief glance of the room he came into he tensed up, in preparation for one of the droids to come barrelling through the door to the hall.

Thus it was a nasty shock when one of the skinned dogs came bounding towards him from behind the settee. Its rapid mechanical breathing only started a moment after he came into the room.

With his arm in the wrong position Anakin had to fend the creature off with a harsh kick, but it landed wrong in the poor light and the thing recovered quickly, launching itself at his other side. Anakin managed to dodge, sending it crashing into the wall with a yelp, but again it needed no time to turn around and rush him again, this time snapping at his leg.

Anakin had moved around, but at a bad angle, backing into the settee and then in a moment of true stupidity trying to move it out of the way with the Force. The Force was as silent as it had been two minutes ago, the moment was wasted, and the creature closed its jaws on him.

Now, Anakin was wearing tough boots the creature’s fangs couldn’t get through, but at the angle it bit him two of those fangs slipped over the edge of the boot and pierced the cloth of his trousers, then the skin on his shin and calf. The pain was sharp; Anakin drew his knee up and brought the wrench down on the dog’s head as hard as he could but it didn’t let go.

“Fuck!” Anakin cursed, striking another blow, then another. The angle just wasn’t right. Now the thing had him it wasn’t going to let go that easily. He tried pulling at its mangled ears with his other hand but they just slipped through his grip.

The dog made its horrible growling noise, like a wind tunnel, and dug in deeper. But Anakin had a flash of inspiration and, clenching his teeth, put the jaws of the wrench to the tooth that was half buried in the front of his leg, rolled his mechanical thumb over the wheel that turned the adjustment screw as fast as he could – _kriffing antique lump of metal!_ – and fastened it around that one fang.

Then he pulled it straight out of the dog’s jaw. It shrieked, finally letting go of his leg enough for him to kick it back and drive further against it, raining down blow after blow until the static on his communicator faded away.

Gasping for breath, Anakin limped away from the body so he could rest of the sofa. The wrench had actually broken the tooth, leaving the tip embedded in his shin, and he pulled it out with a snarl.

“… fuck,” he said again.

Not his best moment. The Sith Master was probably laughing his head off at him after that one. Kriffing dogs.

_Wonder if I can persuade Master Yoda to teach wrench combat at the Temple next year_ , he thought bitterly.

He imagined the disappointed look Obi-Wan would be giving him if he were here and put more effort into focusing himself. If he was going to get Obi-Wan out of this alive, he needed to do better.

Anakin tended to the wound as best he could, using up the last of the bacta that had come with the survival kit pack in the transport. Any wounds after this, and he was going to have to risk using the stuff he’d found lying around town. Still, the punctures didn’t go more than an inch in – he was more worried about infection than anything and with luck the bacta would take care of whatever diseases the Sith experiments had given this thing.

Sith experiments…

He turned around to look at the grotesque creature again with a frown. What could the Sith have been trying to achieve that would result in this? An army of rabid attack dogs? Scary for an unarmed or even armed civilian, maybe, but a Jedi outside of this place would have made short work of one. A clone trooper ‘shiny’ could probably have taken out a pack of them.

Had they been testing some kind of virus on them, maybe? Something that destroyed skin enough that it looked like they’d been flayed but didn’t kill the victim, or at least not immediately? The sort of thing they might release a controlled version of on a densely populated planet, admire the carnage and then use as a future threat?

It seemed like something a Sith would do – though somehow he didn’t see the guy in the black cape and armour bending over test tubes in a laboratory – and yet he still couldn’t conceive of anything surviving the kind of injuries these dogs had and focusing only on attacking.

Maybe they _were_ droids, like the blood and crystal-encrusted sphere-headed things that kept attacking him. He tilted his head in scrutiny, considering. If he had something sharp, or if his lightsaber had been working...

Cautiously, he unclipped his saber from his belt and held it out in front of him. Without the Force it would take a lot of effort to dismantle and reassemble the device, and he tested it first with the regular on-off switch.

To his surprise the brilliant blue blade shot out, illuminating the room better than the flashlight was and, at the angle he’d been holding it, slicing through the dog’s corpse diagonally.

But it only lasted about two seconds before it flickered, held for a brief moment, then died.

Anakin tried turning it on a few more times with no luck before sighing and letting the hilt hand in his hand.

_This weapon is your life._

“Right now this ridiculous wrench is worth more,” he muttered ruefully. “Uncivilised though you’d probably find it, Master.”

Given Obi-Wan thought blasters uncivilised, he could only imagine what he thought of beating something to death with a blunt object. Still, he’d had that moment of the blade being extended and he had managed to cut through the dog, so he brought both the lightsaber and the wrench to the corpse and used them to pull it apart at the cut.

He hadn’t quite managed to get it into two separate pieces, but the couple of inches holding it together didn’t obscure the cross-section of skin, bones and organs sizzling in the quiet of the dark room. Anakin couldn’t see anything of metal or circuitry within it.

A living thing, then. Probably for the best he couldn’t detect any Force signatures right now. He hated to think of what this one’s would feel like.

_It’s Dark Side powers that were keeping it alive in all likelihood_ , he told himself. _You don’t understand it, and you don’t want to._

On that morose note he returned his saber to his belt and left the apartment.

Since the level 2 east corridor had been checked as thoroughly as he could for now he moved on to the west section, but as he crossed the stairwell he noticed a flickering in the light on the floor above, something that he guessed was caused by another forcefield.

_That’s going to be annoying_ … he thought.

Apartments 2.1 to 2.14 had only two unlocked doors – 2.9, which was a completely empty apartment, even bereft of all its inner doors along with the near-identical bits of meagre furniture he’d found in the other apartments so far; and 2.10, which had two skinless dogs snarling at his throat.

Taking care of the both of them with only his flashlight to light the room and the wounds on his shoulder and lower leg stinging the whole time was a nightmare, but the dogs were uncoordinated, tumbling into the furniture, walls and each other, and Anakin was beginning to get the hang of these things.

Which was good, because when he left there were another two sphere-headed droids in the corridor.

*~*~*~*~*

Maybe the Sith Master was trying to tire him out, Anakin thought, climbing the stairs to the third level. His arm was beginning to ache in addition to the other small wounds – he wasn’t used to swinging something this heavy around, nor something that made so much of an impact on its targets and – more than once in these tight quarters – on the walls.

As he’d feared the west corridor on level 3 was blocked off by another grid-shaped force field, so he turned to the east corridor instead, relieved to hear no static on his communicator as he went.

There was a large pool of water in this corridor, by the look of it spreading out from 3.24, but after he’d knocked the cover off the card-reader with his wrench – having by now foregone the hassle of unscrewing these covers every time – he found the door in the locked position.

It was at this point he made the useful discovery that smashing the card reader as hard as he could with the wrench was not a suitable method of unlocking the door.

_As always, the epitome of the delicate touch,_ he could imagine Obi-Wan telling him dryly.

“Yeah, well, whose delicate touch got them laid up in a med-pod with their skull cracked open and who’s out here trying to save his ass?” Anakin muttered.

It was unfair of him, he knew, but…

_No buts,_ he told himself. _This town could be the lair of the Sith Master, so start acting like a proper Jedi._

A ‘proper’ Jedi.

Again, the vision of himself slicing the two blades through Dooku’s neck flashed before his eyes and left a cold shudder trailing across his spine. Would they know, he wondered, when everything had died down? Would it matter? The Chancellor would defend him, of course, was probably right in deciding it was for the best; Dooku had been within their grasp and escaped it before, after all –

He shook his head. _Now is not the time. Focus._

There were three doors unlocked in this corridor; 3.17, 3.22 and 3.28. The first door opening elicited a burst of static from Anakin’s communicator and he recoiled, just quickly enough for a green beam of light to zoom past his cheek and into the ceiling behind him.

The bloody droid was on the floor of the apartment, writhing pathetically. When it ‘detected’ Anakin it tried to rise, but something was wrong with this one and after raising itself only a few inches it slumped over again with its head thumping against the metal floor. A horrible noise came from inside its head – a wet, choking noise as it flailed around.

Anakin almost wanted to just leave that apartment but steeled himself and hurried to an angle at which it firing at him would prove awkward. Indeed, when it next fired it missed again, and Anakin rushed it. A few well-positioned blows were enough to put it out of commission.

The room was silent once more. Anakin checked the kitchen units and a large cabinet before moving on; the former of which were empty, the latter containing a small packet of basic universal power cells – with one cell left in the pack. The cell was hardly the latest model; this company had produced bog-standard tech for generations, but it was a lot newer than the last Sith empire, so someone had definitely been here within the last forty years.

Beyond the front room the door to the hall was half hanging off its hinges, the storage closet was open and full of burned out candles and the bathroom and bedroom were empty.

3.22 was of no more interest, though thankfully there were no monsters inside either. The front room had nothing of use in it and the bedroom was only made remarkable by the sticky, black graffiti that had been left on the longest wall.

**DO you TRUST the PEOPLE you TRUST?**

Anakin stared at the words and blinked. _What?_

It sounded like the ramblings of a conspiracy nut on the net. But if it had been a slave living here… Yeah. Anakin could understand that sentiment. The words didn’t really make sense, but he knew what the person writing them had been going for.

Slaves were people, after all, and people could be awful. He remembered camaraderie with his peers in Mos Espa, yes, but he also remembered slaves who’d been flayed alive in the middle of town after being ratted out to their masters for one ‘misdeed’ or another by _their_ peers.

Even those Togruta they’d rescued on Kadavo, when he’d learned how they’d ostracised Obi-Wan during his captivity, he’d had nothing to do with them on their way back to their planet. Obi-Wan had, of course, forgiven them immediately; Rex and Ahsoka had been sympathetic, but Anakin had no time for people like that. He knew his old master had been confused by his behaviour, he could tell, but give him a few more years of being back-stabbed by the people who should have been his sworn allies and…

… and, being Obi-Wan, he probably would have still forgiven them.

He stumbled as he turned back to the hall after confirming the bedroom was otherwise empty.

_You need to rest_ , he could hear Obi-Wan telling him, clear as day. _You won’t be much use against the Sith Master if you fall asleep in the middle of a duel with him._

_You need me to come through for you_ , Anakin thought, _before you die of an easily treated head injury._

_But that won’t happen if_ you _die first._

_Well, if the Sith Master is crawling around the place then resting is just going to leave me open to him coming in and lopping my head off._ Anakin sighed. _Anyway, I’ll see what’s in the last apartment in this section first._

This choice proved to banish the thought of rest from Anakin’s mind though, as he walked into 3.28 to find a body hanging from the ceiling.

In six pieces.

_Nothing like a dismembered corpse to wake you up, huh, Master?_

Like the man in the auto-shop, this one had been burned, though Anakin couldn’t have said whether it was that or the being cut into pieces that had killed him. If he’d had to guess he’d have said the former though, because he assumed this guy had been killed by the same person as the other.

Was this the man who had stolen the star charts then, and did this mean the old crone had gotten them back? And did that mean, therefore, that this whole escapade into Q3 B2 had been a giant, painful waste of time? Anakin peered over the pieces of the man carefully to try and prove otherwise to himself; arm, leg, head, torso, leg, arm. The limbs were suspended from barbed wire and swayed when he passed them, their shadows scrambling about in the light of the flashlight.

The first thing that caught his attention was that at the end of one arm was a clenched fist, and thinking of the key he’d found in the hand of the other man, Anakin was quick to pry the fingers open. No key this time, but a similar scrap of wrinkled paper.

**speak no evil**

_Very useful,_ Anakin thought with annoyance, yet after a moment’s more consideration he found the hint easy enough for even one such as himself to understand, and he approached the dangling head.

From the length of the legs and shape of the hands and torso Anakin was pretty sure this had been a tall, slim human male in life but on the skull there wasn’t much left that might have been recognisable. Even the eyes had been gouged out.

He wasn’t interested in the eyes though. Grimacing, Anakin held the bottom jaw with his right hand and used the wrench to pry the top one up, opening the mouth with a sound like snapping twigs. Something that had once been white was inside, shoved toward the back of the throat, and with his mechanical hand he reached in and caught the object between his middle and index finger, pulling it out.

The teeth clacked together with more force than he felt they ought to have when it was out.

The item was a card, covered in blood and ash that Anakin washed off in the kitchen sink.

**Q3.B2.  
4.8**

A key to one of the apartments on the floor above. Was that where the charts were? But why would the killer stuff the thing down their victim’s throat? Surely they wanted those charts back?

Unless this was some sort of sick game. The guy in the black cape and armour hadn’t exactly given off a ‘playful’ vibe, but there was also the ‘old crone’ to think of.

The problem with that was that there were only two Sith, and Dooku had been killed yesterday. If the man in black armour was the Master, who was the crone mentioned in the notes? An acolyte, like Ventress had been? A new apprentice who’d just been waiting in the wings?

Anakin kept washing, placing the key on the counter next to him and wiping any grit off his hands. He didn’t need to figure any of this out now if he had a solid destination. 4.8. Since there was nothing else he could get to on this level, he may as well have gone straight there.

Well, there were the other rooms of 3.28, he supposed. The bathroom was empty. The bedroom might have been where the man in the front room had died – the bed looked like it had been set on fire, black and crumbling away in the centre – but was otherwise unhelpful.

When Anakin opened the storage closet there was a large portrait inside, taking up almost the entire back wall in a scuffed golden frame. Anakin stopped still.

The portrait was of a family of four; a husband, wife and two children, a boy and a girl, who looked close enough in age that they might have been twins. Water damage in the top right corner had rendered the woman’s face nothing more than an indistinct blur, though Anakin could tell she had dark hair and wore an elaborate headdress and heavily decorated black robes.

The man was also in black, yet his clothes were much simpler, with only a scarlet red sash to pick out from the dark. His face had been ripped off the canvas, and the board behind was littered with vicious stab marks.

Oddly, though it was indeed a painting, when it came to the little girl it looked like a badly-timed holo-snap. There was no damage that far down, but she was blurry too – blurred with motion, turning to look behind her at her mother with her brown hair towards the viewer and only a sliver of a rosy cheek visible of her face. She wore bright white, as did her brother.

His face was the only one actually clear on the portrait, though he was not facing Anakin straight-on but gazing up adoringly at his father. His hair was gold and his eyes were blue, and looking at them stirred something in Anakin – a feeling he couldn’t quite put a name to.

And, like with the Sith Master, a familiarity.

_He does look a bit like I did at that age_ , thought Anakin, remembering his Temple intake photo (though this boy was younger than he’d been then). _Maybe that’s it._

With a last glance at the man with the missing face, he closed the doors to the closet again.

One further thought occurred as he was leaving, however, and he paused by the swinging body parts, this time inspecting the torso. The cuts where the limbs had been taken were clean, but not cauterised all the way through, so they hadn’t been made with a lightsaber.

But could it have been an axe, perhaps?

On departing 3.28 he headed right for the stairwell. The forcefield blocking the third-floor west corridor hadn’t magically stopped working while Anakin had been pulling keys out of corpses, and there was worse news. The same flickering he’d seen on this floor from the one below he could see again from where he was, and sure enough he climbed the next flight of stairs to find another forcefield.

On the entrances to both corridors.

With a third forcefield, this time a purple ray shield, circled around the stairwell and blocking him from getting even as far as the red, grid-like shields. The entire fourth floor was cut off.

Anakin glanced at the key card before putting it away in his sleeve. _Glad I reached into a corpse’s mouth for you,_ he thought. As he’d feared, he was going to end up having to hack the power, which meant a trip to the basement if he was lucky, and a journey to –

A loud thump from above suddenly caught his attention, and he raced up the stairs with little thought. Even if it was just one of the monsters, he was better off killing as many of them as he could, and if it was the Sith Master then he’d prefer to face him and be done with it.

He reached the fifth floor in a matter of seconds, noting both corridors were open, but the noise of clanging footsteps and a shadow passing above him had him skip that floor and head straight up to the sixth. The shadow hadn’t moved like one of the droids or one of the dogs. Anakin held his wrench out in as best a guard as he could as he ascended the last flight of stairs.

Neither corridor had a field blocking it, and the shadow had moved from west to east, so Anakin went to the east corridor first, treading carefully in case the Sith was lurking in wait around a corner. This floor was the most decayed he’d seen; covered in rust and with the floor towards the fire escape looking almost eaten away. There was still power getting up here; all of the lights on the locks on the east side were red, but the west side looked like it had been damaged by fire, and the cover over the lock on 6.16 had already been knocked off, revealing the door was indeed unlocked.

There was someone inside, Anakin could hear them.

It sounded like they were being violently ill.

Casting a brief eye over the scorch marks on the door – like something had been desperately trying to get into to this apartment specifically – Anakin raised his weapon and ran inside.

*~*~*~*

Inside 6.16 Anakin found Maul, bent over and retching weakly.

This drew his attention away from the configuration of the room, but only somewhat. Unlike all of the other apartments not on the north or south ends, this apartment only had one room. Anakin could see evidence of where it had once had the rooms most of the others did; bedroom, bathroom, hall, closet – but everything had been knocked down to leave one very large and mostly empty room.

Well, very large by the standards of these slave quarters anyway.

The entire back wall was taken up by an enormous mirror, so that the first thing Anakin had seen when he’d come in, before Maul even, was a tall man with a flashlight clipped to his chest and dark circles under his eyes rushing at him with a wrench. But there was other light in this room – Anakin was almost fooled into thinking daylight before he remembered apartments in this row had no windows.

Beneath the rather dim daylight-mimicking ceiling light, Maul was steadying himself against the mirror with one hand while the other twitched around the handle of his axe. A small amount of some foul-looking black liquid was pooled on the floor, dripping out of his mouth – Anakin couldn’t identify it and didn’t really want to think about how Maul’s stomach worked.

Of course, the bright gold eyes picked him out in the mirror in a moment.

“Oh,” he muttered. “It’s you.”

Anakin debated whether he should engage in conversation or just kill the bastard. He ended up holding off on the killing, though he wasn’t sure it was a conscious decision.

“Maul,” he said shortly, his voice gruff. “What the _fuck_ is going on here?”

Slowly, the other man staggered to his feet, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

“You haven’t… guessed?” he asked, distantly.

“Guessed?” Anakin repeated. “I’ve guessed this was a former Sith stronghold, and this was where they housed their slaves.”

“You’re correct,” said Maul simply.

“Those monsters running around? Sith experiments gone wrong?”

“Hmm, two for two.”

“And what about your master? Or Dooku’s master – he’s skulking around here too, isn’t he?”

The corner of Maul’s lip turned up.

“Ah. That one might not be such a yes or no answer.”

It would have been ridiculous to expect three straight answers in a row from this lunatic, Anakin thought.

“Well, I saw a guy in a black cape and full armour, with a skull in the faceplate. Friend of yours?”

“That would be difficult to say,” said Maul. “If his face was covered and the Force is silent, then how would I know if I knew him or not?”

“Damn it, is the Sith Master here or not?!” snapped Anakin.

Maul paused, tilting his head and narrowing his eyes, then spoke like his idea was formulating as he voiced it. “You’re not _scared_ of him, are you? The ‘Hero with No Fear’?”

“What, because he has a scary skull-mask?” Anakin scoffed. “That only goes to show that even he thinks he’s already dead. Your _master_ wouldn’t scare the younglings at the Temple.”

Maul snorted. “No, he probably wouldn’t, would he? They’d never know… I am interested though, you mentioned Count Dooku just now – is it true what I’ve heard?”

Anakin’s chest tightened.

“Did you put him out of the Jedi’s misery?”

With a deep breath, Anakin replied, “He left me no choice.”

“I’m sure… ‘he’ didn’t,” said Maul, nodding. “And now there’s a spot open.”

“Yeah, well I don’t intend to give the asshole the time to fill it,” said Anakin shortly. “Unless that’s what you came here for. Going to beg him to take you back?”

With a pained smile, Maul swung the blade of his axe backward into the mirror behind him, sending cracks racing up the glass. Out of the corner of his eye, Anakin saw one bisect the face of his own reflection. He tensed in preparation for a fight, but didn’t flinch from so obvious a show of aggression.

Instead, he asked, “Was that what you used on the guy on the third floor?”

No reaction. Maul stared into him for a long moment and then pulled the axe free with a scraping noise.

“You and I are in a similar position here, Skywalker. More so than you know. Here.”

Before Anakin could blink Maul threw something at him, too low for him to catch, like he’d already anticipated Anakin wouldn’t be gullible enough to try. Anakin sidestepped and glanced at the small object as it smacked into the wall and stopped. A black, pyramid-shaped object.

A Sith holocron.

“You take it,” Maul told him. “I don’t need it now.”

Anakin took a step backwards. “I’m not taking one of those,” he said sternly.

“Then don’t,” said Maul. “It’s broken anyway. But who knows? You may find a use for it.”

Then, before Anakin could reply, he turned towards the mirror in a display that echoed his casual tone. As soon as his eyes fell on the glass he suddenly started, crying out and backing away.

_What?_ Anakin thought, turning around in case Maul had seen something behind him that –

“No!” Maul yelled at the reflection, “No, no, no!”

And with incredible speed he pushed past a confused Anakin and ran out into the corridor, screaming at nothing. At the same time, the failing light above them flickered and died, leaving Anakin floundering to turn his flashlight back on before calling after the other man –

“Hey!”

But as he turned to follow him his eyes fell on the holocron, and he hesitated. The hesitation cost him, because he heard the sound of metal feet on rusted floor going east – towards the fire escape, and by the time he ran out after him Maul had leapt across the decayed part and was already putting a key into the lock.

Bastard had the fire escape key! “Maul!” Anakin yelled after him, but the door opened and then slammed shut, and Anakin knew he couldn’t make the jump without the Force. “Damn it!” he yelled, hitting the corner of the wall. The edge was rusted away enough that the tool went through the wall about an inch and Anakin had to struggle to pull it out again.

_Unbelievable. I fell for the kriffing ‘look over there!’ trick, more or less!_

_Fuck!_

Even when he stormed back to 6.16 there was a moment where he was startled by the man in the mirror coming towards him out of the darkness.

_You need to rest,_ Obi-Wan would have said.

“Not now,” Anakin muttered darkly. Then he took a deep breath. “You wouldn’t have let that happen no matter how tired you were.” He snorted bitterly. “I’ve seen you do better while you were practically bleeding out.” _You’d probably have more luck with the Sith Master than me._

_It’s not a question of luck, Anakin. Come on, you know that._

Anakin groaned lowly, rubbing his face with his hands. When he dropped them back down to his sides he glimpsed the holocron again and found himself moving toward it without thinking.

He reached out for it, then abruptly drew his hand back a moment later. Sith holocrons were objects of darkness and he should have had nothing to do with one, but he couldn’t leave it lying around for anyone to pick up, even if it was broken as Maul claimed.

_I’ll take it back to the Temple so they can destroy or secure it safely, whatever the Council decides._

Kneeling, he closed his right hand around it – almost surprised he didn’t feel its darkness despite the Force being blocked – and lifted it. Something inside rattled around – lending weight to what Maul had said about it being broken and making him feel a fraction safer about taking it.

Then, once he’d stored it in his belt, he noticed there had been something on the floor beneath it.

It was a disc, like the one he’d found earlier with the Knight on it; circuitry on one side and a figure on the other, but this time in gold. The figure was a middle-aged man, dressed in stately robes with a lightsaber in one hand and a set of scales in another. The letters around the edge spelled out –

THE FATHER

…

_“I am neither, and yet I am both.”_

…

The words from what seemed like so long ago floated into Anakin’s mind, though the figure on the coin looked nothing like ‘The Father’ he had met on Mortis. And he supposed, having no other reference for a ‘father’, it wasn’t too strange that it should do so.

But thinking of Mortis… that was something that had given him nightmares enough since it happened. He didn’t need to go over it here too.

_Are you the One?_

Well, it was nothing to do with this disc, he told himself. In fact, though he had little knowledge of historical Sith fashions, Anakin was pretty sure a Jedi would never wear robes so ostentatious as those the embossed figure bore, and perhaps there was something in his face too that looked like it held in it the cruelty that could only have belonged to a Sith Lord.

Even so, he tucked the disc into his sleeve with The Knight, and gave the rest of the apartment a brief once-over before leaving.

Back in the corridor his communicator started up with the static again, and Anakin was at the point of rolling his eyes when one of these hideous creatures turned up – though he narrowly missed the green light scorching his face when the mangled droid staggered out from the stairwell. There was only one, and Maul had confirmed what they were, so what reason was there to worry?

Anakin grabbed the thing by the arm – almost let go immediately in disgust, it was so warm – and managed to pull it down and forward, almost to its knees. A sharp blow with the wrench pushed it over before it could recover, and he followed it up with a series of them, one after the other.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

The crystals coming out of the sphere cracked open, and the blood or whatever it was poured out, making a slight hissing noise on the rusty floor.

Alarmed by the sound, Anakin jumped over the corpse towards the stairwell and backed away. The floor didn’t cave in or anything, but he held his hand up to the light to make sure there wasn’t anything corrosive on the part of the droid he’d touched with it.

It stained, it seemed, but there was no damage.

Once he’d put his hand down his eyes fell on the corridor to the fire escape Maul had left by, and all of a sudden he realised – he may not have had the key for that door, but he had the key to the front entrance, and if there was a back entrance that used the same lock then he might have been able to reach the first floor east corridor after all.

_If nothing else, it gives me the excuse to leave the apartment for a good thirty seconds_ , he thought.

*~*~*~*

Anakin wasn’t sure how long he’d spent in Q3 B2, but it was noticeably darker than it had been when he had gone in.

The planet’s day-night cycle looked close to Standard from the initial readings, he remembered. _Hopefully I’ll be out of here by daybreak._

It didn’t seem likely he’d get out by nightfall.

He tried to contact Jesse again once he was out, but with no luck – and none with Artoo either. Anakin really hoped the little guy went back to the transport without him as they’d agreed and didn’t find yet another loophole in his programming that let him disobey Anakin’s orders. One of these days he was going to have to do a complete overhaul of him.

The dogs, it turned out, were not diurnal; two attacked Anakin when he came back out into the street, but he opted for avoiding them instead of dealing with them permanently in case delaying meant more and more of them would pile on.

The wind had picked up since he’d last been out, dust and sand blowing down the shrouded streets. The strange thing was it seemed much warmer than before.

He didn’t have to worry about that now, however, because fortunately the back door did indeed use the same lock as the front.

Ten of the fourteen doors in the east first floor corridor were marked with red lights; one was green and three more had burnt out. Once Anakin had knocked the covers off their locks he was able to determine that 1.17 and 1.22 were the only unlocked doors in the corridor.

1.17 was all but empty; Anakin found nothing more than a drawer full of cheap plastic miniature figurines – soldiers of some sort but too far before his time for him to identify, and a message scratched into the mirror in the bathroom.

DON’T LOOK

Anakin made himself roll his eyes, but there was still a degree to which the message unsettled him.

There was another message waiting for him – and in this case he believed it was, in fact, for him – in 1.22. In the centre of the front room was a plain, square durasteel table. On the table were three cube-shaped wooden boxes, finely polished and with intricate lattice decoration. Before them there was a square of stiffer paper, folded over. Anakin approached the table slowly, feeling suspicious but still on a timer as he picked up the card. It asked him –

****

**_What do you need?_ **

And he noticed there were symbols carved into the boxes at the edge of their lids.

Au

ZrO2

Li2CO3

Anakin blinked at the middle one in disbelief. _ZrO 2? Zirconia? There’s no way it can be that easy…_

It wasn’t. When Anakin tentatively lifted the top off the centre box there was, laying inside on a black cushion, yet another metal disc, a silvery white colour.

This time the other face was embossed with the figure of a young girl, dressed informally, with a Padawan braid running from her short hair.

“Looks a bit like you, Snips,” he said quietly, though the figure seemed to be human.

Like the other two, the girl had a lightsaber in one hand. In the other, what looked like a necklace – at that size it was difficult to tell. The letters on the edge dubbed her:

THE HERO

And Anakin thought she may have suited that descriptor well enough. He added her to his growing collection, thinking now that the discs might actually have been placed around the apartments for some kind of purpose. Likely for the purpose of playing mind games with him, knowing the Sith, but they were going to have to do better than that to rattle him.

Although… how would the Sith Master have known he needed zirconia specifically?

Unless he was keyed in to their communications. That would just be great.

As he left 1.22 Anakin tried to mentally review what he and Jesse had discussed over the comm that the Sith Master might be able to take advantage of – knowing Jesse had set up a perimeter alarm, for instance – but he was immediately distracted by the corridor into the stairwell.

The red grid was gone. The way to the stairwell was open.

“What the…” Anakin was surprised enough that he said it aloud – and there was a further surprise in store.

First he heard the swish of a door opening – from the location of the noise he figured it was the one that led down into the basement. Then he heard footsteps on the metal floor. He approached the entrance to the corridor cautiously to get a better view and that’s when he caught a flash of the noise-maker: a person in bright orange running past, towards the stairs.

It wasn’t Maul, and it wasn’t the Sith Master – and though the Force was still smothered something inside of Anakin felt pulled towards this person to a much greater degree than mere curiosity explained.

He raced into the stairwell, just as the other had reached the top of the first flight of stairs.

“Hey!” he yelled up at them.

They stopped at once, whirling around, wide-eyed.

It was a boy – young man, really – in an orange flight suit, with a mop of golden hair and sky-blue eyes. He stared back down at Anakin like he was just as surprised to see him as Anakin was being seen by anyone other than the monsters swarming this building.

And… there was something else about this person. For a long moment they just stared at each other, not speaking. Anakin’s heart was doing something strange, and although he wouldn’t have said he saw recognition in the boy’s face, he saw… something. Something he didn’t think he’d ever seen before. Something he didn’t know how to explain.

Then something back in the corridor Anakin had come from caught the boy’s eye and somehow they widened further.

“Look out!” he cried.

Anakin turned, as the noise of the static on his communicator returned, and was joined by fast-paced mechanical gasping.

Dogs. Their nails clicked on the floor as they approached: one, two, three of them. Anakin grimaced, having not had to face more than two at a time of these things yet and feeling the wound in his leg from the one that had got him earlier. But then the boy came back down the stairs almost to Anakin’s level, with a blaster drawn.

“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of them,” he assured Anakin boldly.

His accent… was he from _Tatooine_?!

The boy raised his blaster at the advancing dogs, but that was when the third shock came – the dogs stopped. Not of their own accord; they seized up suddenly, shivering in a weird manner, their panting fading in and out but not making the corridor quiet.

Something else was breathing in the darkness. Slower, more regularly, but through a respirator of some kind.

In-out

In-out

The three dogs were lifted into the air, their necks twisting as they choked.

The Sith Master in the black cape and armour came around the corner, his hand outstretched.

“Oh, no…” muttered the boy. “Quick, run!”

He lowered his weapon and ran back up the stairs. Anakin hesitated long enough to hear three necks snap one after the other and see the Sith with the skull face carry on towards him.

Then he followed the boy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who can this mysterious boy be? Find out next time!
> 
> ... actually you don't find out until Ch.6.
> 
> ... actually it's pretty obvious who it is, isn't it? ; )


	5. The Key to Escape

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, everyone! Welcome back! I'd not been posting so close together in order to concentrate more on winning NaNoWriMo, but I hit my 50k yesterday, so I thought I'd post a chapter to celebrate :D (you can all now rest assured that there's at least another 50,000 words of this delightful story in existence)
> 
> In this chapter... a lot of stuff happens. I should probably say that we begin to see a few of Anakin's... hang-ups, that I thought I should make clear are a part of this story's version of him, and not held personally by myself, necessarily. You'll probably see what I mean.
> 
> On that note, this is also where we start to see a glimpse of darker themes. 
> 
> All comments and kudos are much appreciated - hope you enjoy this installment!

_Tactical retreat,_ Anakin told himself, running after the boy. _If he can use the Force and I can’t, then I might as well throw myself onto his saber yelling, ‘please kill me!’_

The Sith could use the Force. Fuck.

And the heavy footfall on the stairs below confirmed he was still following.

Anakin was already jumping onto the stairs to the third floor when he risked a look over the bannister toward his pursuer. The crimson red glow of a Dark-Sider’s lightsaber was moving steadily up the first flight to the second floor, throwing small, fire-like highlights on the otherwise pitch-dark helm and armour. Anakin kept running to the third floor.

Above him, he could still see a glimpse of bright orange every other moment. And he yelled –

“He’s following, keep moving!”

The boy had been smaller than him, but he was quick, and already a floor above him – which was good, because Anakin wanted to remain between him and the Sith Master. Despite knowing the kid for about five seconds he was feeling pretty well-disposed towards him, as the first thing he’d come across in this town that wasn’t a corpse or a killer.

He’d even tried to help Anakin for a moment there. Not to mention he seemed to know something of the Sith warrior: at least enough not to bother even trying to shoot at him.

“Fifth floor!” the kid yelled down at him.

Fifth? The one Anakin had skipped because he’d heard Maul moving around on the sixth? But whatever reason the kid had to think it was a good bet, the Sith must have heard him.

_I should draw him away_ , Anakin thought, now ascending onto the fourth. _This kid looks like he can hold his own against dogs or droids but he’s right to run from a Sith._

_Facing him is_ my _job._

New plan in mind, Anakin paused on the fourth floor to check again how far behind the Sith was. He was still following at the same pace, still about one floor beneath Anakin. Anakin briefly noted that the red grid-fields on both sides of the corridor had been deactivated – _must be the kid’s doing_ – but the mauve ray-shield was still blocking him off from the fourth floor.

Heedless, he ran for the fifth. He caught a flash of the bright orange peeling off towards the east corridor on that floor, checked on the Sith again – still following – and then ran for the sixth. This time he waited longer, making sure the Sith was going after him and not the boy.

He was. The red light heralded his approach onto the mid-level between storeys. Anakin made sure those soulless windows in his mask had a good line of sight to Anakin heading east, and stopped at the entrance of the short corridor to the fire escape before turning, like he planned to face the Master there and then.

The Sith stalked on, straight for him like a machine that had been given its orders. He came towards Anakin with his saber in a high guard, while Anakin kept his wrench out in front, until the last possible moment he judged his idea possible. When the Sith was almost in the east corridor, Anakin turned towards the fire escape.

High ceilings had not been a priority for the Sith who’d built this dump. Anakin had no problem jumping down – avoiding a strike that would have taken his head off – and slipping through the rusty-edged hole in the floor to the level below. 

On the fifth floor he couldn’t see any sign of the kid, and that was probably a good thing. He ran back towards the stairwell with a quick glance behind him to see if the Sith warrior was following. He was, but with his armour he was clearly too bulky to get through the same hole, so it was the blade of the saber that came slicing down through the floor first, sending glowing fragments of rusted metal flying.

Anakin kept running: down the stairs to the fourth floor, which he hit just as a loud, ominous clang from above told him the Sith had made it down to the fifth. He kept going, onto the third where he confirmed the west corridor was now accessible, then the second, the first, and out to the front entrance he rushed through to the street, and with a twinge of something that might even have been the Force throwing him a hint, he pulled out his lightsaber and extended the blade.

This time, the blade held its form, humming in the air. Thank _goodness_ for that.

Now in open ground, Anakin felt a lot more secure in facing this foe, who’d already exposed a weakness: his armour made him incredibly slow. Anakin waited with his guard up for the door to open – maybe for the Sith to come around from the back – whichever it would be, he was ready now.

_All right, Sith. Let’s finish this._

And he waited.

And waited.

And nothing happened. A full minute later there wasn’t even any static on his communicator, and no sign of the Sith Master, the experiments, or the boy.

_He was following me_ , Anakin thought, suddenly nervous. _Did he double back and go after the boy?_

“Damn it,” he hissed, running back to the entrance and into the apartment block.

It was quiet. Quiet, and noticeably much warmer than it had been before. Anakin ran up the stairwell and down again, checking all corridors except the blocked ones on the fourth floor, gasping for breath by the end of it but seeing no sign of either of the others – or the monsters – anywhere in the building.

“Fuck!” he snarled, just as his saber went out, and refused to turn back on again. “For fuck’s sake!”

He hit it against the wall, which got him precisely nowhere. So he started taking deep breaths.

_Focus, Anakin_ , Obi-Wan would have told him.

_I have to try and find that kid though_ , he thought. _He’ll need me. How in the Sith Hells did he get here?!_

From what he was wearing it looked like he was a pilot of some sort. Maybe someone else who’d been stranded here. The uniform wasn’t Republic or Separatist so far as Anakin had seen, but a Jedi was meant to protect people from Sith no matter who they were, and the feeling that that boy in particular desperately needed him was strong – almost bizarrely so.

Yet he was nowhere to be seen.

_I’d have known if the Sith got him, wouldn’t I?_ Anakin thought. _Even without the Force?_

In fact, while the Sith was near him, he _had_ felt something in the Force, hadn’t he? And the Sith himself was certainly able to use it.

_Maybe whatever is going on in this place is something you just have to get used to. Even my lightsaber was working for a while back there._

He tried to reach out to Obi-Wan, hoping he’d be able to tell that he was at least still alive, but there was nothing now. Just a moment of tightness in his chest. He breathed in, and out, and focused on centring himself.

_I should try and contact Jesse_ , he thought. _Let him know about the kid. And the Sith._

The communicator gave him static – not the kind he’d identified as warning of one of those monsters approaching, but not exactly helpful. Hoping for the best, he left the building again and tried his luck with the communicator. The static was less outside but it sounded warbly, like the communicator was on its last legs. Again – _just_ what he needed.

_I did find that power cell,_ he remembered, before he got too frustrated _. Let’s see if today wants to cut me a break._

To Anakin’s amazement, when he swapped out the power cell for the one that he’d found earlier the warble went away, and the static actually cleared significantly.

_A faulty power cell?_ he thought incredulously. _That’s the most mundane problem I’ve had in_ years _._

“Jesse?” he called into the device. “Jesse, come in, over?”

“ – ir? That you, sir?”

Anakin exhaled with relief. “It’s me. I think I’m close to the charts but there’s another Sith running around the place. Tall guy in a cape and full armour; can’t tell for certain what species. Jesse, I’m worried he may be listening in, but there’s nothing I can do with what I have to encode a transmission, so you need to be extra careful, over.”

There was a brief rise in static, which Anakin interpreted as Jesse sighing into the comm. “I will try to get my head sabered off as carefully as possible, sir.”

That was morbid, but Anakin couldn’t blame him. If the Sith tracked Jesse down, he was done for unless Obi-Wan experienced some miraculous recovery, and if not then Obi-Wan was done for too.

“Never mind,” Jesse continued. “I’m only one clone, after all. Good soldiers follow orders.”

Anakin’s stomach lurched. Those words – hadn’t they been…?

He purposefully veered off from that line of thought, reminding himself that Jesse had had a bad twenty-four hours to say the least, and deserved reassurance.

“Well, don’t worry too much, Jesse. I’m pretty sure this guy is more interested in me. And remember – if you go three hours without hearing from me and the ship is movable you get yourself to another part of the planet, over.”

“Do you really think it’s going to go that way, sir?”

Something about that question bothered Anakin. But he couldn’t say what.

“I don’t know. But, in case it does, your main priority is going to be to get Obi-Wan to safety – and yourself – and to let the Jedi Council know what happened here.”

“Right.” Jesse paused. “About that Sith, sir – do you know who he is?”

The sky seemed to suddenly get darker on the other side of the fog. The wind blew a flurry of dust and grit down the street.

“I don’t know,” said Anakin. “It feels like I might, but with his helmet on I…” He trailed off. “Anyway, there’s someone else here – a human boy in an orange flight-suit. If I see him again I’m going to try and herd him towards you so we can get him out of here too, over.”

“You think he’s a native, sir?”

“No. Honestly I’m not sure what I think, except that he needs our help. I don’t think he’s bad news, anyway.”

“I suppose I’ll have to trust you on that, sir.”

That dark feeling in his gut – what was it? Anakin hesitated, uncertain for a moment, then pushed it all down. “Chances are it’s best we spend as much time off-comms as possible. I’ll call in again when I have more news. You make sure Obi-Wan doesn’t try to tear off after me before his skull’s back in one piece, over.”

“I live to serve,” Jesse replied lightly. “Over and out.”

“Over and out.”

Anakin took another deep, centring breath before forcing himself to go back into Q3 B2. He’d wanted to ask for an update on Obi-Wan’s condition, but if the Sith was listening then he didn’t want _him_ to know, and didn’t need to know himself since he was going as fast as he could either way.

_Not fast enough. Move it!_

The first and second floors were all searched as much as they could be without him hacking the power to open the locked doors, and the fourth floor was still cut off, but now that that kid had managed to shut off the grid fields Anakin could search the third floor west corridor before moving on to the fifth and the rest of the sixth.

As he ascended each floor the temperature was increasing more and more. Anakin guessed that something the kid had done in the control room in the basement must have interfered with the heating in the building. Though he remained acclimated to it from his childhood, Anakin didn’t like the heat – however, this was a small thing to bear.

What really didn’t make any sense was the dirt in the corridors that he could have sworn hadn’t been there the first time he’d walked through them. He felt it scraping between his boots and the metal floors – a coating of sand like he might have expected on a desert planet, only this town was by a lake in the middle of a lush forest.

Anakin could do little more than add it to the list, though. Adrenaline dropping, he stumbled once as he was knocking the covers off the locking mechanisms in the third-floor west corridor whose lights had failed. 3.2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 11 and 14 were all red. 3.5, 10 and 13 all proved to be locked as well, leaving 3.1, 7 and 12 for him to search.

3.1 was, in some ways, the strangest apartment yet. Apart from having a ridiculous amount of sand on the floor in the kitchen area the place was neat and homey. The shelves in the kitchen were stocked with cooking utensils, the drawers with cutlery, the living area decorated with bright flowery wallpaper and furnished with flower-patterned furniture – and most noticeably lit with a cheap but adequate shaded lamp hanging from the ceiling. Not exactly what Anakin would call ‘stylish’, but it looked like a place someone actually lived in until not so long ago.

The bedroom and bathroom were likewise clean and normal, with functioning lights. Both had a motif of colourful insect life, decorating the tiles, bedspread and framed pictures, which were also on the walls of the hall. There was a paper book in one of the drawers on the bedside table; blank except for the first couple of pages. It was a diary, and Anakin paused to read the few entries within it in case anything in them could help.

_Silent Hill, Q3.B2.3.1, Day 655_

_New job, new living quarters, new diary! Yay! Suck on that, Miriam, you dumb bitch – you’ll be scrubbing Lord Zeall’s floors for the rest of your life at this rate!_

_The apartment blocks are amazing – not only a whole room to myself, a whole fresher and kitchen too – all for just me! And Lord Zeall promised that if I kept helping him the way I have been, I could be moved to one of the end-of-row apartments: those are even bigger, and with two bedrooms! If Lord Zeall allowed me to pick my own husband, I could bring Felis back there with me, and we could put our children in the second room, since I don’t think Felis will still be thinking of Miriam when he could have a wife with an apartment!_

_I might have to find someone else breaking Lord Zeall’s rules if I want the faster upgrade, though. Not that that will probably be difficult, what with everyone around here being complete human trash, if they even are human. Tomorrow I start at the research centre – can’t wait!_

_Well, she sounds like a lovely person_ , thought Anakin, but he read on. Obi-Wan would have told him to have compassion.

_Silent Hill, Q3.B2.3.1, Day 656_

_New job delayed due to Lord Zeall’s daughter running away – again! With all his power I’m amazed she gets away from him so often, but then, I guess she’s pretty powerful too. She made it pretty far too, but Lady Phanti used her own powers and brought her back. Lord Zeall will probably punish her pretty badly, but it’s not like he’ll do permanent damage._

_Anyway, she probably deserves it. Though, at least this time if she used her powers to mess up Lord Zeall’s house, it’ll be Miriam who has to clean it up and not me – ha ha! But I did have to join the search parties in the forest – in the pouring rain! That girl is such a drama queen, and still always going on about ‘saving the galaxy from suffering’ using their powers, which Lord Zeall says is nonsense, and I agree. He’ll lock her up for a standard month at least, and I’m sure Lady Phanti will do extra prayers at mass this week._

_Tomorrow I finally start at the research station!_

_Silent Hill, Q3.B2.3.1, Day 659_

_Started two days ago. Not what I thought it would be. Very tired._

_~~Found out~~ _

_~~It seems~~ _

_~~Lady Phanti’s daughter~~ _

_Will write more later_

_Day 671_

_Town is in uproar – squads all over the streets. Somehow, someone got in from outside. I don’t know much, but Miriam said she heard Lord Zeall say J_

There was nothing else in the diary but a few blots of ink beneath that last entry, some of which had been blurred by water droplets.

‘Lord Zeall’ and ‘Lady Phanti’ must have been the Sith lords who had once run this place, and Anakin suspected that that cut-off ‘J’ character at the end of the last entry had been leading into ‘Jedi’. Maybe the writer had been killed in an ensuing conflict, and that was why she’d never written in the book again, or hastily cleared out her apartment like the others.

Anakin rubbed his eyes. Darth Phanti and Darth Zeall. He could look them up in the historical archives if he ever got back. The talk of ‘saving the galaxy from suffering’, and ‘extra prayers at mass’ rang… oddly, to his mind, when he considered what he knew of the Sith of old.

Hopefully ‘Miriam’ and ‘Felis’ got away in the end, but he doubted it.

He left 3.1 after determining there was nothing of value within, save for another packet of bacta strips in the bathroom cabinet, and moved on to 3.7, where he was immediately attacked by a dog. At this point he had to dig into his reserves to summon the energy to dispose of the creature effectively; his aim was off and he nearly tripped over the corpse once the head was smashed in.

The furniture in this room was all covered in white sheets, and he stumbled towards the settee to get his bearings, telling himself to get a grip when –

_Back in the control room on the Invisible Hand the ceiling was gone, and the harsh light of two suns spilled into the ship as sand from the desert blew in on the wind._

_Dooku was kneeling in the same spot he’d died in, some strange, brightly coloured liquid pouring out from the stumps of his arms in every colour but red. His head was still attached, but down, like it would have been held in his hands if he’d still had them and Qui-Gon –_

_Qui-Gon was there, kneeing opposite – one hand on Dooku’s shoulder, telling him something._

_Anakin hadn’t considered it before, but what if Qui-Gon would have hated him for killing Dooku? He’d been his master, after all._

_He couldn’t hear what Qui-Gon was whispering, and he took a few quiet steps towards the pair._

_“Anakin.”_

_Both Qui-Gon and Dooku turned their heads, towards Anakin but not looking at him: looking behind him. Anakin turned too._

_“Come on, Anakin,” said the Chancellor, standing out near the exit. “Come away from them now.”_

_Anakin began to walk towards him, but wished he could stay. He didn’t want Qui-Gon to be mad at him. Yet, when the Chancellor of the Republic gave a Jedi a command…_

_“Come along, Anakin,” the Chancellor told him, smiling with fond eyes. “I’m afraid we need to go now.”_

_“Anakin.” Qui-Gon said his name, but Anakin didn’t stop, only tried to look back. His head wouldn’t turn that far though._

_“It’s all right, Anakin,” said Palpatine. “It’s time to go now.”_

_Anakin continued to walk towards him. There was something in the back of his mind… something he was forgetting but…_

_“Anakin.”_

_Qui-Gon again. Anakin tried to turn his head once more, this time to the left, and though he couldn’t turn it far enough to see Qui-Gon, he glimpsed something on that side out of the corner of his eye and stopped._

_Obi-Wan._

_Obi-Wan was hurt._

_He was lying under the fallen walkway, trapped and unconscious – and… and he had a head injury too, didn’t he? Anakin needed to –_

_“Anakin,” Palpatine chided gently, “we cannot wait for him.”_

_“I…” Anakin tried to reply, but his mouth wouldn’t work the way he remembered it._

_“You mustn’t linger, Anakin. Come now, come along. It’s almost time.”_

_Almost time… ?_

_Yes. Something important was about to happen, wasn’t it?_

_But Obi-Wan…_

_Things were getting fuzzier, shadows creeping in from the edge of his vision as he struggled to remember how to speak or move. He couldn’t quite get a good view of Obi-Wan either; from where he was it looked like he could only make out…_

_… his top half._

Anakin woke up in apartment 3.7 with a start, scrabbling for purchase on… the front room table? He must have moved there from the settee in his sleep, but why?

And that dream. What had that been about?

Heart racing, he fumbled to turn his flashlight back on and scour the room for any sign of enemies other than the one he’d already killed. That one lay still in the pool of its own blood, and as he double checked to make sure he’d rid himself of the threat once and for all he saw something glinting in the harsh light, between the creature’s fangs.

_Is that… another…_

Still blinking off sleep he reached into the dog’s mouth – which twitched, startling him for a moment before he internally kicked himself for being an idiot and pulled out another metal disc. This one was darker than the others he’d found, with the same circuitry on the back and a figure on the front who was on their knees – one arm raised aloft, lightsaber in hand, the other clutched around the figure’s middle, holding a rope.

It was a woman, and interestingly her saber was in her left hand. Not a point of note for some species, but she and the others did all seem human. Her attire was simple, far more so than that of the man on the gold disc, but it did not look like Jedi robes. The edge of the disc proclaimed her:

THE PROPHET

Not a comforting thought, considering. Anakin’s dreams had been worse than usual for a while now, though nothing like the terrible visions he’d had just before the war. But what he’d dreamed just now… that had been different. Not like a regular dream, but it not like a glimpse of the future the Force was showing him either.

Just to be sure, he reached out into the Force for a moment.

It was like running into a brick wall inside his head.

Master Yoda would probably have told him to meditate on the possible meaning of what he’d seen all the same, but he didn’t exactly have that luxury here. Who knew how much time he’d lost just then? He had a look at the chronometer on his communicator, but hadn’t been paying attention to what time it had been beforehand, so could only surmise he’d been asleep less than six hours.

He didn’t feel particularly rested either.

_Well, you rested at least a little_ , he told himself, _and for all you know, Obi-Wan is dead now – so well done. Get a kriffing move on, ‘Chosen One’._

The impetus to continue rather than pause and meditate was in at least one way a consolation, because for at least one part of his dream – the part where a symbol of the Republic called him away from an injured Obi-Wan to some higher purpose – a simple and unwelcome explanation was there at hand.

On the other hand, he couldn’t even begin to fathom what had been up with Dooku’s rainbow-blood arms.

Anakin gave the rest of the otherwise empty apartment a once over and moved on to 3.12 – in which he found one of the bloody crystal droids, smashed its head in, and left. His sword arm, or wrench arm, if you liked, was still aching fiercely – and granted it often did, not being the original and all – but the wounds he’d accumulated were duller now and he did feel overall less tired.

With the fourth floor still being out of bounds, Anakin moved up to the fifth, noting the building getting ever hotter as he went. Heat rose, after all, so that at least wasn’t a huge mystery, even if it seemed more pronounced than it should have been. Maybe he’d risk drinking the water if he had to stay here much longer.

The fifth floor was not quite as bad as the sixth in terms of decay, but it was the next worst, with copious rust along the walls and doors and of course the hole in the ceiling of the east fire escape corridor. But Anakin began in the west corridor, in which apartment 5.2 and 5.11 were both unlocked – indeed, the door to 5.11 was malfunctioning; opening and closing at random and allowing Anakin a glimpse of the inside.

It allowed him this glance about half a second before the droid he saw within the room fired a blast of green light at him, and he dodged just in time, ducking into 5.2.

5.2 looked like its own private war-zone: scorch marks from blaster fire everywhere; walls, ceiling, floors – even piercing through the steel shutters over the window in a few spots, allowing some air from outside into the room.

It smelled like something out there was burning.

Stepping away from the window, Anakin tried to find something in the apartment that wasn’t entirely destroyed, in case it held a clue to any of the million questions he had in his head at that moment. Oddly enough, the only thing in the apartment that wasn’t destroyed was the toilet.

Figuring he had nothing to lose he lifted the seat. The bowl was filled with foul-smelling black water, and he put the seat down again with a grimace. But Anakin still remembered his Padawan days of foiling the schemes of petty criminals throughout the galaxy, and more than a few of their typical tricks.

He pulled the top off the tank, which had no water in it whatsoever, only a plastic bag wrapped around something heavy jammed between the pipes. He was able to pull that out with the wrench, and tipped the bag out onto the fresher floor, where the contents landed with a loud thump.

It was a blaster.

Old, worn, it wouldn’t have been out of place in a museum on Coruscant, but from the look of it it was perfectly serviceable, and even compatible with the power pack he’d found earlier.

“Now we’re talking,” Anakin muttered with a smirk. “Sorry, Obi-Wan, I know you’d disapprove, but the boys will be happy at least.”

_Rex will no doubt faint with sheer joy_ , he imagined Obi-Wan saying dryly.

Though he doubted this blaster would be much more use against a Sith Master than the wrench, Anakin allowed himself a touch more hope that he would see Rex again to share the good news of his having equipped one, fixed the wrench to his belt and walked to the door.

He could hear the door to 5.11 opening and closing through the thin sheet of metal. Blaster in hand, he waited for the right moment, breathed in, and walked out into the corridor.

As soon as the door at the end of the hall opened, Anakin fired. The weapon proved to be cumbersome, with heavy recoil and poor balance, but it worked. A bolt of blue light shot down the corridor.

There was a jolt in static and the horrible whine the droid made choked off as he heard an impact. However, one shot wasn’t enough to drop the thing and the door closed.

Anakin walked closer, blaster at the ready. The door opened and he caught sight of the light from his flashlight glinting off the protruding crystals. He fired again.

Again, the thing made that awful gagging noise and he saw it flail with the impact, but two shots weren’t enough either. The door closed.

When the door next opened Anakin was close enough to walk through it, and this time he aimed directly at the droid’s ‘head’, and fired a third time.

That one dropped it. He gave it a kick for good measure and the static on his communicator died away.

_Three shots. Maybe fewer if I aim for the sphere. No way to tell how much of a drain on the power each shot is, though._

Anakin sighed.

_… wish I could use my saber._

5.11 was an end apartment, one of the larger ones on the block with the two bedrooms the author of that creepy diary had coveted. In the main room there was a weird assortment of a half-dozen chairs arranged in a semi-circle – not around the screen but around a standing rack of dusty, decayed ball gowns. With a raised eyebrow, Anakin moved on to the larger bedroom.

Here there was a rather stupidly ostentatious bed – four-poster with purple velvet curtains that had been half-eaten by a smaller colony of those insects he’d found in one of the other apartments downstairs and a mirror fixed above it for reasons which Anakin couldn’t fathom.

The dresser was full of fancy-looking bottles Anakin supposed were cosmetics, and the wardrobe with more half-eaten garments, and more of the small creatures who’d done the eating. He shut the door with a grimace.

Out of the blue he thought of that kid from earlier and hoped he was all right. He wondered if he might have stayed on this floor – if he’d find him in the next corridor, perhaps. He didn’t think it very likely, but it might have been nice…

He stopped thinking along those lines when he reached the second, smaller bedroom.

Inside there was a podium set slightly away from the far wall. The podium had a metal plate inserted into its top face, and the plate had five circular indentations. The one on the far left had a light, almost white metal disc inserted into it with a figure of an older woman embossed upon it. She held a lightsaber in one hand and…

… a Sith holocron in the other.

THE MOTHER

Anakin felt the weight of the actual holocron he carried more pronouncedly for a moment, and considered taking it out to compare it to the image, but then reminded himself he shouldn’t be touching that thing if he could help it, especially when _this_ thing had a much more obvious next step to complete.

On the wall above the podium was a framed set of verses, penned in neat, Basic calligraphy that briefly turned Anakin’s memory back to happier times of seeing an exhibition of such with Chancellor Palpatine in his youth. The verse read:

_Here dwelleth the Mother, at daylight’s end;  
The lighter ones through the darker three rend;  
The Father and Hero by the Knight are kept part:  
In the gathering ‘tis he who lies at the heart.  
While away from her comrades the Prophet resides;  
And last by the grace of the Hero abides._

It went without saying he was meant to put the correct discs in the correct place on the plate. The only other clue he had was a scribble, in pen, on the corner of the podium:

**Remember Where You Found Them!**

There was a little smiley face drawn next to it. Not, Anakin thought, something that would have been left by the man in the black armour – so there had to be someone else involved. The old crone?

Anakin took the other four discs out of his sleeve pocket; Knight, Father, Hero and Prophet. He’d found one on every floor except the fourth, but with the one from the fifth floor right at one end it wasn’t going to be as simple as putting them in order of which floor he’d found them on. Nor, if his memory was correct, could he use the number of the apartments he’d found them in.

No, he was going to have to figure out the riddle on the wall. With a groan, he ran his fingers through his hair and re-read the lines.

_Obi-Wan would have loved this_ , he thought. _Probably figured it out right away too._

First things first, he confirmed the Mother was in the right place by trying to take the disc out, and it was fortunate he tried with his left hand, because the plate gave him a small electric shock and he would have hated for that to have affected his mechanical arm.

“Ow!” he hissed, pulling his hand back.

_So, even if the Mother isn’t in the right place, there’s not much I can do about it. Great._

He looked a little closer at the Mother’s face. Her smile was wide, full of glee to the point of seeming deranged. Not the type of Sith he’d ever encountered, but something inside him told him this too, was a facet of that order. Whatever she was smiling about, he probably didn’t want to know.

With a sigh he turned his tired mind back to the verse. The Mother ‘at daylight’s end’. Well, she _had_ been put on one end of the row. He wasn’t sure what daylight might have to do with it unless it just meant she was the furthest west on the plate… which she was.

Maybe that really was it, then. ‘The lighter ones through the darker three rend’, was next, except the lightest of the discs was that of the Mother, and being on one end she wasn’t going ‘through’ anyone else.

The next line was straightforward, but not clear. The Knight was between the Father and Hero, which meant he wasn’t on the other end or next to the Mother, but that left two spaces open and didn’t tell him which way round the Father and Hero were. But it also said he was at the heart, and Anakin guessed that meant the Knight went in the middle – unless that line was referring to the Father?

Then the Prophet was kept away from her comrades? And did the last line mean she was next to the Hero? If she was next to the Hero then there were only two formations the row could take, but who were the Prophet’s comrades?

Unless the verse was talking about their alignments in the Force. The Mother may have been embossed on the lightest metal, but she was holding a Sith artifact – if the ‘lighter ones’ were the Jedi Knight and Padawan Hero, and Mother, Father and Prophet were the ‘darker three’… then for the Prophet to be kept away from the other two with the Knight between Father and Hero the correct order had to be: Mother, Father, Knight, Hero, Prophet.

Another Jedi might have carefully considered this conclusion before putting these tokens in place, but once Anakin saw a viable course of action, he followed it, and put all the discs in order one by one.

_Tell me again why it took you so long to get back with me hanging at death’s door, Padawan_ , he imagined Obi-Wan saying to him as he went. _Sorry, Master, there was this weird coin puzzle in an apartment block and I decided I just had to solve it for some reason…_

And it was ridiculous, really. For all he knew, the discs would cause the podium to explode when placed in the correct order.

But they didn’t.

Inside the podium there was a click, and the metal plate popped out of its frame. Behind the frame was a small recess, and in the recess was another metal key. Five characters were engraved on the key.

Q3.B2.X.

He’d caught a brief glimpse of a similar key earlier when Maul had been using it – the block fire escape key.

And the ray shield on the fourth floor was only around the stairwell, so with this he could access the fourth-floor fire escape and get in from the outside, whereupon he could get into 4.8 with the key card he’d found in the burned corpse’s mouth.

Anakin let out a huge sigh of relief.

Finally.

*~*~*

It was odd, perhaps, that he felt this was the end of this trial. Odd that he was thinking of it as a ‘trial’, even, but that was what it felt like – like little bits of a puzzle had been scattered around for him to find and piece together, almost as if it were a test.

Why _was_ the Sith Master doing this?

_Well, I haven’t confirmed that’s who he is yet_. _But if there are only two and Dooku was one of the two, and Maul was discarded for failure, then who else could this guy be?_

He exited the broken door to a corridor filled with three of the sphere-headed droids. Stepping back into the apartment gave him an easy shield against their small lasers, because even when the door was open, the droids seemed confused, and didn’t even try to fire at him.

Anakin dropped the first with three head-shots, and the second with two. The third wandered off into the stairwell and Anakin had to follow him out, but its back was turned when he fired his first shot and it didn’t recover quickly enough to even turn to face the next two, let alone avoid them.

_Not bad for a hunk of junk,_ thought Anakin, lowering the blaster. He backtracked to the west fire escape and put the key in the lock. Like the front door, it was hard to work with. He had to push the door in and jiggle the key at an angle to get it to turn, but at length the door was opened.

Outside it was almost pitch-black, and somehow even hotter than it had been inside. Anakin’s heart began to race, because he couldn’t think of any explanation for that. The planet hadn’t had a weather control system, had it? Surely it would have pinged their instruments on their way in if there was something that advanced here.

_We were already damaged as we were coming in_ , Anakin told himself. _There must have been an error somehow, or I’m remembering it wrong. Planets don’t get warmer at night – not like this._

Either way, the sooner they left, the better.

_But don’t you have to face the Sith Master?_

Uneasily, Anakin made his way down the clanking steel steps to the fourth floor and unlocked the door, exhaling audibly when it opened, and he saw no force field of any kind blocking him from the corridors. When he stepped over the threshold there wasn’t even any static on his comm warning him of approaching experiments.

This floor was the hottest yet. Had he laid his skin against the walls for any significant time it would have burned him, and every door in the west corridor had a red light on it.

But of course this time, Anakin had a key.

He took the key-card out of his pocket and approached apartment 4.8, alert for a sign of any last-minute attacks from the Sith. He did hear something: a noise, coming from within the apartment. It was odd; the harsh intermittent buzz like a crackle of electricity cloaking a rhythmic, pulsing beat whose pitch seemed wrong somehow – but he couldn’t quite identify it. It was growing louder, and Anakin kept his blaster raised as he ran the key-card through the reader. The red light went green.

As the door opened, the noise stopped. Anakin walked into an almost empty room much like all the others: empty drawers and filthy, cheap furniture. There was still no static on his comm, but he searched the apartment carefully, listening before doors and hugging walls when he opened them.

The bedroom and bathroom were empty too. But Anakin soon found out why this had been his assigned destination when he opened the storage closet, and the light in the cramped hall tripled as it bounced off the mirrors that had been fixed to the inside of the doors. He blinked and peered at the interior.

There was a safe inside. An old safe with an actual _dial_ lock, something he’d only seen once before on Tatooine, in the hands of a local engineer who’d fled the planet a couple of years before Anakin had made it off-world. The man had been an eccentric; proud to show the curious throwback in his possession to the young slave of one of his business partners, so Anakin knew how they worked.

_A dial lock_ , he thought incredulously. _Not a single wire or circuit; these Sith were old school. There’s no way I’m getting in without the code, unless my lightsaber starts working again._

Even if it did, using it risked destroying whatever was inside the safe he’d come to retrieve – same with the blaster, though he doubted the model he had could have shot through the shell of this thing; it was scratched and stained, but he’d seen worse armour on some warships.

Anakin exhaled, tapping his fingers against the closet door before reaching for the dial. It didn’t shock him, which was a good start, and though it was stiff and difficult to move, it wasn’t stuck. He twirled it to a random number and let go, and it spun back to its default position.

_Now what?_ Anakin wondered.

He couldn’t brute force the combination, he’d be there for Force knew how long. But this technology was so old he had no idea what kind of trick might have given him an easy answer. The only other option was to see if he could find the combination somehow the same way he had the disc puzzle, only there was no framed clue above the safe to help him.

But there was, he remembered, a clue back with the discs. _Remember where you found them._

The numbers on the dial went up to 28. The same number of apartments on each floor. Assuming no one could know what order they’d been found in, logically going from first to sixth floor seemed the best option. Anakin wracked his brain to remember which apartments he’d found which discs in.

“Let’s see… twenty-two. Fifteen.”

He twisted the dial as he muttered to himself.

“… seven. Eleven. Sixteen.”

Once he let go, the dial spun back to default.

Incorrect.

_Okay, maybe reverse order_. Anakin happened to glance to the mirrors on the doors. _Or ‘mirror’ order, if you will._

Sixteen, eleven, seven, fifteen, twenty-two.

Again, he let go, and the dial sprung back. With a groan of frustration Anakin ran his fingers through his hair and glanced at the mirror again.

_I turned the dial to the right first, instinctively, but if that’s been reversed too…_

He repeated the same top-down sequence, this time turning the dial left first. Sixteen, eleven, seven, fifteen, twenty-two.

There was a loud click.

Sighing in relief Anakin used his other hand to pull the handle of the safe down and swung the door open. The contents, or some of them at least, poured out immediately – brightly-coloured lengths of rubber packed to the top of the metal box. Anakin reached out to grab the falling objects instinctively, then saw what they were and immediately threw them down again.

“Ugh!” he cried, wiping his hand on his tunic.

In an assortment of luminous and pastel colours, Anakin found himself staring at a pile of fake rubber cocks that had tumbled out of the safe like this had all been one massive practical joke.

And for a moment, Anakin felt a pure, icy-hot rage. Obi-Wan could have been dying, and someone had led him on a wild goose chase for a box of kriffing sex-toys –

But of course, that wasn’t all that was in the box. There was another box.

Gingerly, telling himself not to get his hopes up, Anakin pushed aside the other… items… with the blaster and grabbed the smaller, leather-covered box. This box was thankfully not locked, and inside it was a small library of data chips, and a scrap of paper.

_So close and yet so far. Don’t know why I ever thought I could get out. They always know.  
If you’re reading this I might as well tell you – I did take the hyperfuel, but I couldn’t keep it. The Wise Man has it now, and he’s gone to the Research Station.   
I was stupid. So stupid.   
But hey, at least I have these stars to look at. It’s more than I started with.  
Best of luck._

Anakin looked at the words scribbled on the paper for a long time.

He should have been happy, he supposed, that he had a lead on one of the other things they needed to leave the system, but all he felt was a sense of foreboding. The air seemed like it was getting closer.

At length, he put the note inside the lid of the smaller box and removed the first data chip, managing to get at least a smidge of a spirit lifted when he realised it was compatible with his comm.

But again, whoever had set this box up showed their juvenile side when Anakin displayed the data only to be confronted with a holo-projection of a young blond human giving oral sex to a bulky twilek, the relative silence of the hall broken with obscene choking noises.

Anakin hissed and yanked the chip out of his comm unit. What the _hell_. 

_Damn it, there are twenty-five data chips in this box – are they all going to have… ?_

How disgusting. Much as he appreciated this was likely to have been meant as a joke on the Sith Lord who had imprisoned the man here, he didn’t like being made to watch filth like this, and he sighed heavily before putting the chip back in the device to review the data.

_The things I do to save your life, Master._

He skipped through the film, a minute or so at a time in case the information he was looking for had been hidden in among these films – cringing, when two more twileks came to join the fray. _Why the hell do people watch this stuff?_ Sure enough, there was nothing but porn on the first chip. The second likewise, though this time it was all human females in the video and Anakin could barely bring himself to look.

In his head he knew the people who knew him would understand his having to look to find what he needed to get himself and his friends off this wretched planet. If he was honest with himself, most people he knew him wouldn’t have had a problem with him looking at this stuff on his day off though he wished it were otherwise.

However, it was still embarrassing. And…

The third chip had a human couple: a pale-skinned man with a dark-skinned woman, the former of whom wouldn’t shut up with saying horrible things to his partner –

_“ – filthy little whore, this is all you’re good for, isn’t it!?”_

Anakin went through that one so quickly he set it aside in case it turned out he’d have to go back to it later. The fourth chip had two female Nautolans and a human male with breathing apparatus, underwater. It wasn’t malicious like the one before it – though Anakin was not comfortable with some of the… weird things he glimpsed while skipping through – but his empty stomach reacted to the loud emphasis on the breathing for some reason.

Chip after chip, Anakin got stuck wasting the better part of a half hour, probably not reviewing the contents as thoroughly as he should have – he ended up with a few more set aside to come back to only if he really had to. Ones with restrained actors being whipped until they begged for mercy. Weird scenes of people using things that had no place in an act of… of physical union between two people.

A film of two people pretending to be Jedi Masters ‘disciplining’ two pretend-Padawans; that one really… it was stuff like this that made many people – generally from Separatist planets to the surprise of no one as they were already morally suspect, but many in Loyalist sectors as well – believe the Jedi order was rife with this kind of abuse.

_srs question. wud u let obi-wan kenobi fuk u in the ass for 10 yrs+ if u then got as much togruta pussy as u wanted for the 10 yrs after?_

_depends. wat is kenobi packing, lol_

Anakin had seriously almost tracked those and several other people down over the years through the holo-net and sent them malware in lieu of being close enough to slam them against walls with the Force. This was why Obi-Wan told him to stay off the net, and he was right to.

Though Obi-Wan himself always managed to remain calm when confronted with this kind of stuff. It rolled off him like the rain off of leaves. Anakin didn’t know how he did it.

_Focus,_ he told himself, after putting the ‘Jedi’ themed film to one side. _Two more to go._

The penultimate data chip did not start playing him a video clip when he put it in his comm.

Instead, a holomap of a star system lit up the dark hall.

Anakin found himself literally laughing with relief. A few flicks through the file and he was able to assure himself that it was a genuine store of local systems, complete with hyperspace lane coordinates for the sector.

_As I said_ , Anakin thought. _It really is ‘two more to go’._

There was a space for the chip with the star charts in his miniature tool kit that would keep it safe, so he hoped, because he was sure the hunt wasn’t over yet. But now he only had to find the hyperfuel and the zirconia, and they could get the hell off this kriffing planet.

According to the note, there was hyperfuel at the Research Station, which Anakin had marked on his map earlier, so he knew where he’d be heading after this. Things were looking up.

…

…

There was still one chip left in the box. Should he… ?

There could have been more valuable data on it. He really should have checked it, even if it was probably more porn.

He really didn’t want to.

Halfway towards standing up he sank back into a crouch and groaned. _One look_ , he decided _. I’ll give the thing one look, and as soon as I see anything suspect I’ll take it out of the comm straight away._

He pushed the chip in and grimaced as the projection stuttered – the data had been corrupted somehow, it seemed. He couldn’t see much in the blurred light at first, but there was a garbled, high-pitched voice coming from the static-filled audio. Initially the individual words were intelligible, but it sounded uncomfortably like… a child…

An image flashed clearly too quickly for him to decipher it, then –

_“No! No, please don’t hurt my Mama!”_

_What the hell…_

Then the blur finally coalesced into a recognisable image: a naked female torso and upper thighs, probably human, moving jerkily like she was being restrained off-camera. Anakin hesitated from surprise more than anything, seeing she was quite clearly pregnant.

_“Please!”_ the voice cried again from off-screen. Anakin wasn’t breathing.

A pair of gloved hands suddenly brought a lighted blowtorch in front of the camera.

_“No!”_

Anakin yanked the chip out of his comm immediately and threw it to the ground, standing up fully and backing away until he hit the wall. He stared at the offending chip for seconds afterwards, as though if he moved it might start playing again on its own.

His mouth tried to move of its own accord, to ask the question _why?_ – but there was no breath in his lungs and he had to gasp it in first, mind blanking.

Soon after, before he’d caught his breath, the anger started to swell within him and instead of asking an inane questions at no one he unclipped the wrench from his belt – picked the chip back up and put it between the wrench’s jaws then levered them shut until they wouldn’t go any further, crushing the thing into fragments of plastic and metal and tossing them aside.

_Fuck this,_ he thought, stumbling out of the hall and towards the door to the corridor. _Fuck this._

He slammed his hand down on the exit button and stepped out onto the fourth floor – the mind that couldn’t focus for a moment on what he’d just seen almost grateful for the opportunity to switch its attention to the new problem that presented itself to him.

The building was on fire.

And, a few moments later, the man in the black cape and armour came up towards him from the stairwell.

*~*~*~*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the next exciting chapter it's Anakin Skywalker versus Darth Vad - I mean, Anakin Skywalker versus the mysterious Sith warrior of unknown origin who may be the Sith Master behind the Clone Wars for all we know. Stay tuned to find out how that goes down, and thank you for reading this far!


	6. Blue-Eyed Creature

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, everyone! Hope you're all doing well. I'm hoping to get chapters up weekly from this point on.
> 
> In this chapter, Anakin finally gets out of the apartment block and meets up with some friends. In this respect, I'm actually feeling kind of envious of him...
> 
> Thank you to everyone who comments, leaves kudos or even just enjoys the story. But please do leave a comment, if you have anything to comment on!

The heat was intense, the air choking, and even the brightness of the flames in this darkness threw Anakin off-guard – but he could still hear the heavy breathing of the Sith Master over the roar.

_Of course this guy shows up again now_ , he thought.

“Wouldn’t let me leave without saying goodbye, huh?” he called out.

The Sith answered by igniting his lightsaber.

Anakin threw the wrench aside and unclipped his own lightsaber, extending the blade on the gut feeling that it would work this time. It did – the blue light hummed with strength and held its shape after. Something about the presence of this monster dispelled whatever effect was suppressing the natural function of the kyber crystal.

The corridor was a terrible place to fight even without it being on fire – no matter which way he turned he was backing himself into a corner unless he attacked first, and Anakin had no problem with attacking first.

He rushed the Sith, aiming straight for his head, only to find himself immediately pushed back with the Force. He was able to duck out of his opponent’s hold and sidestep the counter-strike that would have sliced through his chest, bringing his lightsaber up to guard himself just quickly enough to avoid a red blade coming down though his shoulder.

The sheer _power_ behind the blows of this guy! Even Anakin’s metal arm felt like it might break as he held the Sith off in a brief bind. He manoeuvred his way out and sidestepped again with his aim at the Sith’s left shoulder, but even though the Sith was slow, he wasn’t too slow to bring his saber back up to block Anakin’s strike. 

Another Force push almost threw him right into an apartment door – which Anakin thought best not to let take place; not only because he didn’t enjoy being thrown into walls as a rule, but there was a large plume of flame sprouting from that door, and he was pretty sure his clothes were flammable.

_But durasteel isn’t. What even is the fire burning?_

By contrast, the cape of the Sith Master didn’t seem to want to catch fire; it swept over the flames like a shadow, unaffected.

Anakin swung forward at the Sith again, hoping to push him back into the stairwell. His first blow was blocked, and he swung again at a different angle but that and the next series of strikes were parried, almost effortlessly on the part of the Sith, until Anakin had to break off for the sake of the muscles in his upper arm. The Sith said nothing, but he swept his own arm aside, dropping his guard flagrantly as if to say –

_Pathetic._

So, Anakin put both hands on the hilt of his lightsaber and struck again, with more power this time. The Sith mirrored him – bringing his other hand up to grasp the hilt of his own saber and, despite the way the armour was clearly holding him back, meeting him blow for blow every time he struck.

Soon, Anakin’s frustration began to get the better of him. He launched himself at the Sith with a burst of power and when that obviously telegraphed blow was blocked he kept pushing, holding the Sith in the bind as though they’d agreed to a test of pure, physical strength.

He would have lost that test – his opponent thrust him back after a long moment and with a great heave into the Force threw him against the door at the end of the corridor. Anakin’s head clunked heavily against the burning metal; he gasped, breathing in a lungful of ash as his vision swam and his eyes watered.

The Sith didn’t give him any time to recover, he was stalking towards Anakin even before he had hit the door, seeming to ripple as he walked in the intense heat of the flames. Coughing desperately, Anakin managed to bring his lightsaber up to block the hit that would have cloven him in two, but his form was sloppy, and the Sith was able to manoeuvre his wrist around and disarm him – the hilt clattering onto the metal floor.

Anakin grabbed the Sith’s wrist with his other hand before he was able to slice his head off, but his opponent simply raised his own spare arm, and clenched that hand into a fist.

As though Anakin’s neck had been within it, he felt his airway constrict. He tried to kick at the Sith with about as much result as he would have had kicking a concrete wall, and reached out to the Force in desperation to try and loosen the grip around his throat.

There was nothing. He couldn’t feel it, it was like being lost. All he could do was glare into the black eye-cover of a helmet far more scratched and battered than he’d noticed before, watching his own reflection struggle.

_Damn it, no! He can’t be able to do this just like that! It’s not possible!_

_Come one, Chosen One, you can’t let him win! Keep fighting!_

But the harder he struggled, the tighter the Force grip of the Sith choked him, their own regulated breathing still audible over the flames as though to mock him as he suffocated.

It was only as the fire began to speckle into little stars before his eyes that he heard something else.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOOEEEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOO

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOOEEEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOO

A long, low wail of a siren, blaring out through the building and by the sound of it throughout the entire town. Its callous howl sent a shooting pain into Anakin’s head that he would have screamed at, if he could have.

The Sith heard the siren too, and though his vision was fuzzy, Anakin could see him look up at the noise, and around, and hesitating not a moment longer he dropped Anakin from his grasp in the Force and retracted the crimson blade of his saber.

Anakin fell to the scalding floor, scrabbling wildly for his own lightsaber while he coughed and gasped, his vision blurring and focusing alternately second by second. As his mechanical hand closed around the hilt, the Sith Master turned, and slowly walked away.

_What? He’s just leaving!?_

“Hey!” he wheezed out, extending his blade again and crawling forward with his weight on his mechanical arm to keep his skin away from the floor. “Stop!”

The Sith Master showed no sign of having heard him, moving slowly back to the stairwell as the sirens blared.

“Hey, I’m not done with you!”

_Bold words, for someone who was about to die_ , he thought, but he pushed that thought aside.

Then, as the Sith crossed over into the corridor to the stairs, the flames in the hall went out. They went out – just like that, from the two ends inwards towards the stairs – and the air Anakin was still choking on became clear.

_How… can he control the fire through the Force so easily?_

To do so was not impossible, but it was incredibly difficult, even for a Jedi Master. Yet, as the Sith went on, and Anakin could hear his steps clanking before he managed to reach the corridor, the fire followed him, as though it were his servant, and it left the hall in darkness.

When he made it to the threshold himself Anakin tried to stand up properly, but as he braced himself against the wall the blade of his lightsaber extinguished itself, and wouldn’t turn on again.

“Come on…” he hissed, jamming his thumb down on the button over and over to no avail.

Around the corner, the Sith began to descend the stairs. With his time running out and still unable to catch his breath, Anakin pulled the blaster from his belt and fired three shots off in rapid succession at the black helm. The first skimmed the back of the neck. The second struck the back of the helmet dead on. The third a little higher than that.

The armour deflected all of them, and the Sith warrior didn’t even turn his head.

Anakin growled and tried to run after him anyway, but the pain behind his eyes was growing sharper, his vision wasn’t clearing despite the fire fading away, and it felt like the world was spinning around him.

He fell.

Through half-closed eyes, he could yet make out the black shape of the Sith Lord, turning the corner onto the next flight of stairs and taking all the light with him.

Somehow, he could hear him breathe like he was still right next to him.

All around him.

*~*~*~*~*

_There was darkness._

_Darkness, and fire, all around him – everywhere. They twisted together like a rope endlessly wrapping itself around him. And the light of the fire did nothing to banish the darkness. And the darkness did nothing to hide him from the agony of the flames._

_It was everywhere, inescapable, no matter how hard he tried to run – tried, couldn’t move. Legs wouldn’t carry him. Didn’t even feel like they were there. Tongues of flame twining around limbs without feeling or presence. Dark hands burying beneath his skin, peeling it away layer by layer._

_There was no memory of a way out of this nightmare, no thread of thought or rationality, but it was not panic that gripped him. He felt he had been trapped here too long for panic. Yet, out of the depths of that horror, he cried out to the one person he thought might be able to help him._

Are you there?

Is there someone there?

Please.

Please, I don’t know where I am.

_And he was answered._

_And the voice… sounded like Obi-Wan’s._

_“You are lost!”_

_“You are lost!”_

_“You are lost!”_

_The words echoed into the night, and disappeared, and Anakin wished desperately to hear them again rather than the silence that drowned him._

_But…_

_He was not yet alone._

*~*~*~*~*

Anakin woke with a start, brandishing his lightsaber and managing to extend the blade for a brief moment before it puttered out again. It was just enough to confirm for him that he was in the stairwell he’d fallen in, and he felt frantically for the switch on his flashlight so he could illuminate the room again.

He kept moving as he did so, in case he was in danger, but there was no sound of the Sith Master’s respirator nor any static on his comm. He was safe, relatively. No dogs or droids in the hallway, and he hadn’t suffocated on the smoke, but his eyes were sore and there was ash all over his clothing.

_Well, no worries there_ , he told himself. _There was a whole rack of ballgowns for you to change into in 5.11. You can be the prettiest Jedi at the ball._

_… if they let you keep calling yourself a Jedi, after_ that _performance._

He sighed.

_At least get your breath back before you start with that._

His throat was dry. He still didn’t want to risk the water coming from inside the building, and thought the lake to the north seemed the much safer option – and also in the direction of the Research Station.

Had Obi-Wan been there, he probably would have advised meditation on what had just happened. Anakin preferred not to do that. A retrieval of the wrench he’d thrown aside, a brief assessment – _his disadvantage was his lack of manoeuvrability, that’s why he made sure to attack me in close quarters and why he wouldn’t follow me out into the street before. Next time, I won’t let him keep me in a confined space; then it’ll be fine_ – and he was ready to leave.

Obi-Wan, after all, needed him more than he needed to take care of the Sith Master, didn’t he? It wasn’t like he was running away from him. He’d get Obi-Wan and Jesse off the planet, and then he’d come back.

Or at the very least, he’d get Obi-Wan and Jesse off the planet. Or away from ‘Silent Hill’, if nothing else. And then, it would be fine.

_Obi-Wan is still alive_ , he reminded himself. _It’s Obi-Wan. He’ll be fine, as long as you hurry the fuck up. He wouldn’t die. Remember the Rako Hardeen op? That turned out fine, didn’t it?_

_So he’s fine._

_And I’m fine too._

Grabbing on to the bannister for support, Anakin began pulling himself downstairs, noting briefly that the ray shield had been deactivated – probably by the fire. He couldn’t really see any major damage to the building from said fire, perhaps because the Sith Master had been controlling the flames with the Force, but then he couldn’t see much with only a flashlight anyway.

There was some minor burn damage to his mechanical arm and the sleeve that had covered it: cosmetic, really. His knees hurt a little, he’d had to put at least some of his weight on them when he was crawling against the hot metal floor, but the side he’d slept on didn’t seem to have suffered, so the heat must have dissipated quickly.

All in all, he’d had worse experiences.

As he regained his balance he sped up towards the second and then first floors, checking his comm to see how much time had passed since he’d fallen unconscious.

Less than an hour, it turned out, which was why he was surprised to see daylight filtering through the fog when he left through the front door.

Day. No, night had fallen just a few hours ago… even if he took into account the time he’d spent asleep, surely it hadn’t been long enough for the sun to rise? This hemisphere wasn’t in its summer phase, was it? Stats had pegged the planet as typical of Coruscant in climate, and it had been far too cold when he’d arrived for it to be summer at this latitude... though it would fit with how hot it had been when it was dark.

Maybe his chronometer was broken.

It was almost eerily quiet now. Anakin tried to contact Jesse again to let him know he had the star charts and would probably be coming back soon, but he couldn’t hear anything but static and garbled nonsense on the other end of the line.

The voice the nonsense came in was familiar, so Jesse _was_ trying to answer, but the connection was just too poor. He hoped the message at least got through on Jesse’s end.

If nothing else, he was grateful to be able to confirm Jesse was still alive.

Anakin checked the map for the fastest way to the Research Station. Not a complicated route – north up the road the apartment block was on and then west along the edge of the lake. It was some distance away, and if too many of those creatures attacked he’d have to run it, but that wasn’t really a problem. He was a Jedi Knight last time he’d checked.

He started off at a light jog, keeping an ear out for the tell-tale sound of static or the mechanical breathing of the Sith warrior. It wasn’t until he reached the end of that block that he even remembered he should also probably still be concerned about Maul hanging around – the man had promised to kill him yesterday and all.

Funny, really, how he hadn’t even tried since they’d both got here. Anakin had a feeling though, that perhaps he didn’t want to read too much into that. Maul was crazy, after all.

_And now I’ve encountered the Sith Master, it’s not like we really need Maul alive to identify the guy. So next time we meet up,_ I _should probably make every effort to kill_ him _._

_What reason is there not to?_

His mind turned briefly to the holocron he was carrying and what information about this place might be on it. He realised he shouldn’t even try to ascertain how broken the device was, but…

There was a small alley between the two buildings he was running towards and out of the corner of his eye Anakin saw something sparkling through the fog at the far end of it. Figuring a five-second detour wouldn’t hurt much, he found himself pulling off to see what it was.

In a clump of withering grass was a small brooch, kind of in the shape of an arrowhead. Anakin decided the archaeologists at the Temple might find some interest in it, and added it to the other items in his sleeve pocket casually.

Then he heard a noise.

At the other end of the alley were two paths branching off in opposite directions. What he heard came from one of them, and sounded like a small animal’s whine. Anakin hadn’t seen any native wildlife so far in this place, so he hesitated, listening carefully.

A softer, human voice murmured something around the corner.

_Is that… that kid?_

Anakin ran toward the sound. The fog didn’t gather so well here, so he could see the other end of the path, where the youth in the orange flight-suit was kneeling by a chain-link fence that blocked him from going any further. Anakin caught sight of him just as he was throwing something through one of the gaps in the chain – a small morsel of food probably – towards a little, furry animal that was trembling on the other side.

“Hey. There you go, little guy.”

The animal, a grey, bedraggled looking ball of hair with curious amber eyes and a long tail, sniffed at whatever it had been offered. Then Anakin moved closer and it saw him, and immediately ran away into the fog.

The kid sighed.

“What do you know?” he muttered. “Doesn’t like ration bars.”

_He’s all right. Thank the Force_ , thought Anakin. _Though I should probably check._

“Hey – you okay!?” he called over.

Whirling around, the youth’s hand moved for the blaster that was holstered at his side, but he stopped that motion quickly when he saw it was Anakin and a look of elated relief came over his face, his blue eyes widening.

“It’s you!” he cried. “You were in… Q3 B2!” He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the apartment block. Anakin huffed out a single laugh.

“Yeah, so were you. Are you okay? That Sith – the guy in the black cape and armour – he didn’t hurt you, did he? I tried to draw him out – “

“You mean Vader? No, he didn’t hurt me.”

Anakin should have been reassured to hear it, but his mind went blank for a moment.

_Vader_.

There was something… he must have known in the Force he’d meet him one day. That it was all coming down to this.

_If you meditated properly you might have seen this ‘Vader’ in greater focus before now,_ he imagined Obi-Wan telling him. And he’d have been right, hard as it was to admit it.

Vader...

For a moment, he could see flames in the edges of his vision.

“How about you?” the kid asked, grabbing his attention again.

Reaching up to his throat unconsciously, Anakin replied, “A little light bruising. Nothing too serious – I was lucky.”

He added that last bit for the kid’s sake, not really considering himself so. But this young pilot needed to be aware of how dangerous a Sith Lord could be.

_If he isn’t already_? Obi-Wan might have asked.

And indeed, the kid then said, “I’ll say. There aren’t many who can say they’ve gone up against Darth Vader and lived to tell the tale.”

He _knew_ the Sith Master? This kid?

That should have put Anakin on high alert, and yet the youth looked and sounded – and _felt_ – so earnest, that he found himself only a little curious.

“You know him?” he asked.

“Not really,” said the kid. “I guess you could say I’ve run into him a couple of times. Usually there was a lot of death involved.”

_Of people you were close to_ , Anakin inferred from his tone.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “You didn’t track him here, did you?”

There was a flicker of something in the boy’s eyes, but Anakin couldn’t quite discern what it meant.

“Well, I was actually in the area looking for my father,” he said. “Then _one measly fuse_ blows on my fighter and I end up crashing here – up on the mountain there,” he gestured south, “at least I think it’s over there. Hard to tell in all this.”

“I’ll say,” said Anakin with a snort. Then, after a pause, “You’re not… from Tatooine, originally – are you?”

The bright blue eyes widened yet again. “Wow, I can’t believe you caught that!” exclaimed the kid. “I’m normally lucky if someone from nearer the core can tell I’m from a Hutt planet at all, let alone _that_ ball of dust.”

Anakin responded with an expression halfway between a smile and a grimace. “Grew up mostly around Mos Espa myself. I’m Anakin.”

He held out his left hand. The kid, stunned and seemingly over the moon, took it without hesitation.

“Luke.”

_Luke,_ Anakin thought, smiling fully. _A good name._

“All right, Luke. What kind of shape is your ship in – she a lost cause?”

“My landing was pretty poor, I have to admit,” said Luke. “I don’t know, there was something on my way in that… anyway, I skated along the edge of a ravine and balanced it on the edge – had to bail out or I would have fallen in with it. Now I don’t even think I could get to it, let alone fix it. I was hoping they’d have something in town, but…”

“Yeah, I’ve seen what they have in town,” said Anakin. “But my transport only needs a replacement zirconia strip for the life support system and a re-supply of hyperfuel and we should be good to go. There’s more than enough room for an extra body on board.”

He could have said he was giving the kid a million credits and not have seen him light up as much as he did. “Really!? I’ll earn my way, you know – I promise I’m no freeloader! I’m a pretty decent pilot, usually, and I can definitely find my way around most anything mechanical!”

That was good to hear. Anakin brought the map up on his comm unit. “In that case I want you to go back to my transport directly.” He drew a route on the map. “If you follow the road from here for about two kilometres you’ll find our ship not far off the path. My friend Jesse is working on the repairs there – he could use a helping hand.”

Luke blinked. “But shouldn’t I go with you? With all these monsters around? If we work together, maybe we can get what you need faster!”

“With a Sith Lord on the loose?” Anakin countered. “Scratch that – two Sith Lords. I was tracking one on my way in: a red zabrak with metal legs, calls himself ‘Maul’. I don’t think he’s as powerful as the guy in the cape and armour, but it’s much too dangerous out here for a regular person.”

“Hey, I can take care of myself!” Luke protested.

The way he pointed those earnest blue eyes up at Anakin made him look about twelve years old. There was no way Anakin wasn’t putting his foot down on this.

He sighed. “Luke… what do you know about the Jedi?”

Any offense Luke might have taken before seemed to dissipate in an instant. “Not as much as I’d like.” He said. “My father was one! And he had a friend who was also a Jedi who looked out for me for a while – before Vader killed him. I’m nowhere near the level of a real Jedi, but he did manage to teach me a few tricks… what?”

Anakin made a concerted effort to close his mouth.

Father was a Jedi?

Jedi friend killed by Vader?

Taught Luke something of the Force?

The first one was the one he was most stuck on, though Luke’s father wouldn’t have been the first Jedi in the history of the Order to break that little rule. Chances were he wasn’t still considered a Jedi at the Temple. As for his ‘friend’ – well, there were more than a few mendicant Jedi out there who rarely, if ever, checked in with the Council. But if this guy had encountered ‘Darth Vader’ at some point, it might have been nice if he’d dropped the Order a note about it.

Of course, that wasn’t Luke’s fault. Anyway, even if Luke was Force-sensitive and had some, rudimentary training, there was no way Anakin could let him potentially face the Sith Master, or even Maul.

“… nothing,” he said, “I was just a little surprised.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “When you say your father was a Jedi…”

“Vader killed him too,” Luke said, grimly.

Anakin stared. “But… didn’t you say…?”

“That I was looking for him? Don’t worry – I’m not crazy! At least, I don’t think I am. I mean, Ben told me Vader killed my father, but I got a message – a message saying he was here, waiting for me.” Luke glanced off to the side. “I just thought.... well, maybe Ben made a mistake, somehow.”

_Ben must be the father’s friend he mentioned. I should ask more, but…_

Time was running out.

“I guess I don’t have to explain to you about the Force being… blocked off here, somehow,” Anakin said, changing the subject.

“No,” said Luke, “I definitely noticed that. You’re a Jedi too, right?”

“Yeah…” said Anakin. “I’ve only had some, limited access to the Force since I got here. I don’t think Maul has access either – though I wouldn’t underestimate him even without it – but that ‘Vader’ guy? He can definitely use it. You saw him with those creatures earlier.”

Luke’s brow furrowed and he looked away. Anakin continued.

“No offence, Luke, but you wouldn’t stand a chance against him and I don’t want anything to happen to the only person I’ve met here who hasn’t tried to kill me. The best thing for you to do is to go back to my transport and wait for me to get the parts we need.”

Luke clicked his tongue and rolled his eyes like Anakin used to when Obi-Wan would tell him this or that was too dangerous, but Anakin had learned to fold his arms and hold a gaze with Ahsoka, and eventually Luke relented.

“All right,” he said. “But here, take this.” He held out his blaster – well-used, but much more advanced than the piece of junk Anakin had found. “I saw what you were using.”

Anakin shook his head. “I’m not going to take your weapon, kid. I may not have seen any of those monsters since I got out of the apartment block, but I doubt they all magically vanished. You’ll probably still need it yourself.”

“I have a back-up,” insisted Luke.

“Yeah, so do I,” Anakin patted his wrench. “And when it comes to the Sith, a blaster will be about as much use.”

He expected the kid to press the issue, but something about the wrench had caught Luke’s attention, and he was staring at it distantly. Then Anakin realised it wasn’t the wrench he was looking at, but Anakin’s lightsaber next to it.

“What?” he asked. “What is it?”

“Huh?” Luke blinked rapidly, frowning. “Oh. It’s... it’s nothing, I just…”

Anakin tilted his head. “Something about my lightsaber? Have you seen one before?”

“I have my father’s,” Luke told him. “I just… don’t have it with me.” He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, I’m probably not making any sense.”

“It’s okay,” Anakin told him. “I’ll keep an eye out for any other Jedi who might have come here. If I find him, I’ll bring him back to the transport too. Do you have a picture of him?”

Luke shook his head slowly, a lost look on his face. “No, nothing. I’ve never seen what he looks like.” He met Anakin’s stare for a moment, and Anakin couldn’t take his eyes off him. “Can I tell you something?”

The sudden change in the flow of conversation confused Anakin, caught him off guard.

“Sure, yeah,” he said, a little awkwardly.

“Well, it’s weird,” Luke started, hesitantly, “but, ever since I came here… I feel like I’ve _forgotten_ something. Something important.”

Anakin had a strange feeling then, looking at Luke’s compelling blue eyes looking off into the fog. A feeling like Luke could see something he couldn’t, and would follow that invisible thing to a place Anakin couldn’t go. He almost wanted to grab the kid’s arm and steer him back to the transport himself, before he slipped away from him, but…

He had to hurry. Obi-Wan was broken, bleeding. Anakin was his only hope.

“Don’t worry about it,” Anakin said, at length. His hands came up to the boy’s shoulders, gripping them lightly. “I’m going to take care of everything, Luke. You need to get to my transport where you’ll be safe, and once we leave here, everything will be back to normal. In the meantime, I can handle a Sith Lord or two on my own.”

_Bold words for someone who was almost just killed by one_ , the same dark voice inside him said.

_Yeah, well – they don’t call me the Hero With No Fear for nothing._

For a long moment Luke considered what he’d been told, probably searching for any argument that might mean Anakin would accept him tagging along. Eventually, reluctantly, he nodded.

“All right. I’ll go.”

Anakin smiled and ruffled his hair. “Good kid.”

It only struck him a moment later that that was an overly familiar thing to do to a boy he’d just met, but Luke only beamed up at him and tried to un-muss his gold mop with limited success, giving him a not-entirely sincere “Hey!” in turn. “I’m not a kid, you know.”

Anakin snorted. “You’re what, thirteen, fourteen?”

“I’m twenty-three!”

Managing to catch himself before he blurted out, ‘oh, me too!’, lest the kid think it put them on an even footing when it came to facing the danger that was in this town, Anakin only did a double-take, before a closer scrutiny confirmed for him that yes, this ‘boy’ was probably right about the same age he was.

Yet, if he didn’t look that hard, then Luke seemed just as young as he had before, and just as much in need of Anakin’s protection. So –

“And if you do as I say, you might make it to twenty-four.”

Luke glared – or tried to, the look didn’t really work well for him. “What about you?”

“I’ll be along. One of my friends was injured so I don’t want to spend any more time here than I have to.” With Luke still looking unconvinced, he tried – “Look, if you get lost, wait for me by the ‘Welcome to Silent Hill’ sign. It’s right on the road.”

“… okay. But you’d better not let anything happen to you.”

With a chuckle, Anakin gave him a final clap on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about me. Just keep an eye out for those creatures.”

“I will,” Luke assured him.

“And stay away from the Sith if you see him – Vader _or_ Maul.”

“I _will_ ,” said Luke, and Anakin wasn’t too sure if he believed him or if that wasn’t the same tone Ahsoka had used when she had promised she _absolutely_ would not go with them to the Citadel to rescue Master Piell and Captain Tarkin. There was a glint in Luke’s eye that Anakin didn’t trust alongside the smile.

But the Sith Master was going to be more interested in ‘The Chosen One’, so Luke had to be safer if they split up. There wasn’t much else Anakin could do for him for now.

“All right,” he said. “Good luck.”

“You too,” said Luke, and he put a hand on Anakin’s shoulder in turn before taking a running leap at the fence.

He climbed it nimbly, swung his legs over and hopped down onto the other side, waving back at Anakin before taking off into the fog. Anakin watched him until he had completely disappeared, and then kept watching. Normally he’d be able to put aside any worry for a single civilian easily enough yet there was something that started to gnaw at him as soon as Luke was out of sight, something that felt not so much foreboding, as it did… protective.

_Come on, Chosen One_ , he told himself. _He’s not the first small creature with big blue eyes you’ve come across._

_And he wasn’t telling you everything back there, was he?_

That truth was really pretty obvious, yet Anakin did not get the sense that Luke was holding anything back from him deliberately, or at the very least, not maliciously. He had been affected by whatever was messing with their Force-sensitivity in this place too, and perhaps in a different way to Anakin.

He wondered a little that Luke’s father’s friend had never brought him to the Temple on Coruscant – for a basic assessment, even if he had been too old by then for initiation into the Order. But perhaps this ‘friend’ had been a Jedi more like Qui-Gon, who did things their own way.

As for Luke’s father… well, he could ask him more about that later. Hopefully.

_It was a strange coincidence though_ , he thought, _that he should be from Tatooine_.

He pushed that out of his mind for now.

Anakin left the alley the way he’d come in, both a little more relieved and a little more uneasy than he’d been before. However, the thought of Obi-Wan lying on the bed at the med station of that small transport, blood leaking into his hair, was never far from his mind – and it spurred him on towards the lake.

It didn’t take that much longer to reach it; a small park with benches and a gazebo – a sign saying:

**DO NOT FEED THE WILDLIFE**

… and not a single sign of any wildlife around to be fed. Anakin wondered if those dogs had any instinct to feed anymore. They must have, or have something that was keeping them alive, mustn’t they? The friends of the little furry creature Luke had been feeding?

He filled his canteen at the shoreline and dropped in a purification tablet that had come with the transport’s survival kit, shaking the container. The water was calm and somehow moody, but it looked clear and from the size of it on the map should have been large enough that anything toxic the Sith had caused ought to have been well dissipated if it had ended up here.

Anakin sipped the water slowly and refilled what he’d taken. It tasted foul – that was those awful tablets for you – but it was a sorely-needed relief on his throat.

_You should eat something too, sir_ , Rex would have told him, if he’d been there.

Good old Rex: managing to make Anakin feel guilty from lightyears away. But Anakin wasn’t hungry.

For a moment he looked out over the lake, as far as he could. The fog drifted along the water in thick bursts, yet there were places where it was thinned, and if he peered hard enough he almost thought he could see something on another shore.

_No, it’s far too far away for that, isn’t it?_ He checked the map. It still flickered when he tried to go north of the lake towards ‘Old Silent Hill’, but he thought he had more of a picture of it than last time. There _was_ a large building on the northern shore, though he couldn’t tell much more than that.

_It’s miles off, though. No way I’d be able to see it from here._

Frowning a little, Anakin dragged his eyes away from the unending mist and shook his head to try and clear his mind of it, and of all his other doubts. He began running west along the lakeside path again, towards the Research Station that was about twenty-five minutes away at that speed.

However, it was barely a single minute before he stopped. There was a figure on the path, watching the lake.

Anakin froze and reached for the blaster. Luke had run off in the other direction and he would have had to have been pretty fast to double back and get here already. The only other two people here who hadn’t set off the static on his communicator were Maul and ‘Vader’, and only a few steps closer he could see the figure was definitely too tall to be Luke.

With one more step he saw movement: he’d been noticed, and he raised the weapon in a defensive position.

_Not really tall enough to be that Vader creep. Does that mean…_

“Anakin?”

The figure walked towards him out of the fog. But it wasn’t the Sith Master, Maul or Luke.

It was Obi-Wan.

*~*~*~*

There was a long moment where Anakin’s brain just went blank, remembering the weight of Obi-Wan in his arms as he’d laid him on the med-station bed in the transport hangar bay. His skull had been _broken_ , how could he –

“Master?” he breathed out.

Obi-Wan smiled – his usual, serene smile. Anakin lowered the blaster with a loud exhale.

“Master, what are you doing here!?” he cried. “How did you – Force, I thought you were dying, I – “

“I’m sorry, Anakin,” said Obi-Wan with a chuckle. “We tried to contact you, but there was too much interference in the atmosphere. I’m relieved to see you’re all right.”

“ _You’re_ relieved!? That shot cracked your head like an egg – I thought you were going to die!”

“Well, fortunately Artoo managed to find a medical centre in the town and bring back some supplies, which the med droid used to seal my head back up again; so no worries there.”

_Artoo_ , thought Anakin. _Thank goodness one of us managed not to drag their heels._

He took a moment to look Obi-Wan over. His old master had changed out of the blood-stained pale robes he’d been wearing and into a wine-dark red set he must have found on board the transport – they had a Mandalorian flair to them. Apart from a bandage wrapped around his head and secured with a pin, he looked very much his usual self; hair and beard neat, eyes ringed a little darkly but not so much to make him look unhealthy, posture straight, tall and confident.

At that moment Anakin still couldn’t believe it. But then, that was probably because out here he couldn’t feel Obi-Wan in the Force – nor Obi-Wan him, by that logic.

“Did you find Maul?” Obi-Wan asked.

Composing himself quickly, Anakin replied, “I’ve seen him twice, but…” _This could get complicated_. “Well, how much was Jesse able to tell you?”

“Everything you were able to tell him, I shouldn’t wonder, but I haven’t been able to raise him since I crossed the border into town.”

_We should try again_ , thought Anakin. _He’ll want to know we’ve met up –_

“So,” Obi-Wan went on, matter-of-factly, “the Sith Master has decided to show himself, has he?”

Anakin wasn’t sure what to say in reply, the sting of his abysmal performance against the monster still holding his tongue. But he met Obi-Wan’s eyes to let him know, ‘yes’.

“Hmm. Well, it was only a matter of time. And unlike us, he can use the Force in this place, I understand?”

“Yeah,” said Anakin, his left hand unconsciously rising up to his neck.

Obi-Wan noticed the movement however and walked right up to him, reaching out towards the skin with an ever-more troubled look that let Anakin know without asking that the Sith’s attempts to strangle him had left bruises.

“He did that?” asked Obi-Wan. His voice was lower all of a sudden.

Anakin shook his head slightly as if to brush it off. “It’s nothing,” he said. “I was reckless, like you always tell me I am and no doubt are about to tell me again. But I know what he’s capable of now and next time things will be different.”

There was a brief pause before Obi-Wan looked him straight in the eye.

“Anakin.”

“Yes, Master?”

“You were reckless.” And his serene smile became a smirk.

Rolling his eyes, Anakin felt himself a little more at ease. “Very funny, Obi-Wan.”

“Anyway,” said Obi-Wan with a chuckle, “You shouldn’t be quite so eager to face this man again. Not until we figure out how he can use the Force and not without me backing you up.”

“You want to stay in town, then?”

“Maul is here,” Obi-Wan pointed out, “and we did come here to recapture him. The Sith Master is here, and putting a stop to him could very well put a stop to the war.”

Immediately Anakin’s thoughts went to Jesse and Luke, and how much danger they’d be in if they remained on the planet with two Sith, but he knew there was little point in bringing it up with Obi-Wan, because those were just two lives – one of whom had agreed to put his on the line for this very purpose. Still…

“Even so, I don’t know where he is. I got my hands on a set of local star charts and some intel that there might be hyperfuel at the Research Station, so that’s where I was headed next. Might be an idea to have some handy so Jesse can get away if he needs to.” He paused. “Plus, there was a civilian running around here that I’ve sent his way.”

To his relief, Obi-Wan nodded. “That intel of yours sounds perfectly trap-like to me, so I suppose we really ought to spring it.” He turned towards the west road. “It’s this way, is it?”

Anakin nodded in turn.

“Then let’s get going, my Padawan.”

With a short laugh, Anakin reminded him for the umpteenth time – “I was knighted, Master, several years ago now. You’re uh, sure your old head’s all right there, are you?”

Even though Obi-Wan still referred to Anakin as his Padawan regularly at the best of times, the question was only half-joking. Anakin was as of yet not an expert in brain trauma, and it still worried him that only yesterday he’d been able to feel the dent in his Master’s skull with the less sensitive fingers of his right hand.

And Obi-Wan, even without the Force, seemed to understand exactly that – because with a knowing smile he took hold of Anakin’s left and brought it up to the side of his head where the wound was, laying the palm against it firmly.

Anakin felt his breath catch in his throat.

“What do you think? Does everything feel in order… Anakin?”

His own name sounded strange all of a sudden, like Obi-Wan had never said it before. He could feel the warmth from Obi-Wan’s head bleeding through the smooth material of the bandage, and the heavy thumping of his own heart. He didn’t touch Obi-Wan all that often, as a rule; it was not the Jedi way. Contact between them was as long as it ought to have been and never lingering, ever since he’d started coming into his teenage years – except in rare, extenuating circumstances. Obi-Wan had remained physically distant even when Anakin had been recovering from the loss of his arm, for him to do _this_ –

The whole moment was… odd, somehow.

But Anakin didn’t want to potentially cause Obi-Wan any more stress by spacing out right now, so he willed himself into focus and concentrated on the feel of the head beneath his hand. It felt solid; Obi-Wan didn’t even wince at the slight pressure Anakin was applying, and because it was Obi-Wan it was easy for Anakin to tell himself how stupid it had been for him to have been worrying so much in the first place.

Obi-Wan, of all people, was hardly going to die just like that. Obi-Wan walked off crashes and bomb blasts and blaster wounds with astonishing regularity. Obi-Wan had defeated the Sith who had killed his Master when he was just a Padawan – would have killed him, if not for whatever Dark Side power Maul had used to cling to his worthless life. Obi-Wan was all but unflappable, untouchable, and every bit the epitome of the ideal Jedi. It was hard, relieved as Anakin was, not to feel inadequate by comparison.

Yet in that inadequacy came the overwhelming gratitude that the Force had not taken his old Master – because what was Anakin to do without him?

_Stop that,_ he told himself. _You’re the Chosen One, aren’t you? Or you’re more powerful than Obi-Wan and anyone else besides at any rate. So stop moping around and start measuring up. You know you can be better than him._

_Don’t you?_

“Well?” asked Obi-Wan, after what had to have been a ridiculously long pause. Anakin pulled his hand away quickly, feeling his face heat up.

“Your skull does seem to still be there, or at least Artoo managed to do a good job of gluing in a replacement,” he joked weakly.

Obi-Wan rolled his eyes. “Yes, well I hesitate to imagine what Artoo might have thought appropriate to use as such after having his program continually altered by _you_ all these years,” he teased. “Now, shall we make our way to the Research Station?”

“Do you have a weapon, Master?”

Obi-Wan held up a standard-issue blaster. “Jesse was kind enough to provide. I understand those _creatures_ that I’ve seen roaming the town are Sith experiments of some kind?”

“Maul said they were when I ran into him,” Anakin replied.

“Mm, and did he happen to mention why we can’t feel the Force here?”

“He said there was… a _hole_ , in the Force. But this is Maul we’re talking about, so who knows what’s really going on.”

Stroking his beard thoughtfully, Obi-Wan glanced out at the fog over the lake, then back at Anakin. “So, _he_ can’t feel it either… but this ‘Vader’ can?” Anakin nodded, and Obi-Wan smirked again. “Well. I do so love a good challenge, don’t you?”

Anakin snorted. “I’m glad you’re backing me up, Master, that’s all I can say.”

They began to move off along the lakeside road, with Obi-Wan in the lead, but he looked back as he answered –

“I’m glad to hear that, Padawan-mine.” He looked ahead again, but went on. “Considering everything that’s happened, there are times…”

He walked, but his pace was fast, and Anakin found himself straining to catch up. “Times?” he asked, the uncertain feeling in his chest expanding.

“Times I wouldn’t be surprised, if, maybe…”

Obi-Wan looked back at him, still smirking.

“… you _hate_ me.”

It sounded like it was a joke, really.

But suddenly, Anakin’s heart began to race out of control. The edges of his vision clouded.

He needed more water.

“What…” he choked out. “I don’t…”

_Don’t hate you._

_Could never_ hate _you._

_Well…_

_Sometimes, I..._

_But no. It couldn’t be true._

“Keep up, Anakin,” Obi-Wan called back to him, striding forward confidently. “We have a war to end.”

Anakin jogged after him on wobbly legs, trying to brush that strange remark off as the joke it had to be.

…

…

But it wasn’t working.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wellp, I guess Obi-Wan is fine and there was nothing to worry about after all!
> 
> My apologies to those of you who wanted Obi-Wan in the pink leopard-print skirt. I have failed you.


	7. Bowl-O-Rama!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, everyone! Welcome to lucky chapter seven!
> 
> In this chapter, Anakin and Obi-Wan go for a run, take a trip to the Silent Hill Leisure Centre, stop by a Sith coffee shop (darkest caf in the galaxy!) and eventually end up in hospital. 
> 
> I hope everyone enjoys this chapter and would like to thank those who have left kudos/comments or are just still along for the ride. I do love receiving comments for this story, so please feel free to leave any thoughts you have below!

It was easier not to think about what Obi-Wan had said when the Sith experiments attacked.

They came leaping out of the mist one after the other. Almost like they were being hurled at them by whatever malevolent power had this entire town under its grip. Obi-Wan’s blaster was far more modern and effective than Anakin’s – or it should have been, but to his amazement the shots from the typical clone-issue blaster were taking about as many as the shots from the piece of junk he’d found in a toilet to drop the skinless dogs that were gunning for them. Ten minutes and five dead dogs in, and Anakin stopped to take a look at the two weapons side by side.

“There’s no way this piece of crap should be performing on par with one of these,” he remarked, seeing no flaw or damage to the blaster Obi-Wan had brought.

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know,” said Obi-Wan airily. “But I’ll grant you it does seem odd.”

“Everything about this place seems odd,” said Anakin darkly.

He couldn’t wrap his head around it. He knew there were things here that just didn’t make sense, things he’d previously written off in his worry for Obi-Wan, like how the dogs were even alive. Sith experiments, yes, but how? He’d neither seen nor heard anything like it.

And where were the people of this town? The B2 apartment block had seemed abandoned for a long time, if nowhere near long enough to have been last occupied before the Sith of Bane. But other places around town seemed like they’d been occupied only that morning. He didn’t think it had been Luke who had been frying those burgers when he came in.

Hadn’t there been an old man…?

The thing was, not only did it not make sense, but it was difficult to concentrate on trying to make it make sense. Perhaps it was because the Force was still smothered, or maybe –

“You look tired, Anakin. Have you had any rest at all since we landed?”

“A few hours,” said Anakin. Obi-Wan looked displeased but said nothing, thinking this mission too important to start coddling him, no doubt – which actually made a nice change. “I’m fine,” Anakin insisted. “You’re the one who had his head bashed in.”

“I think you’re over-exaggerating, slightly,” said Obi-Wan dryly. “But there’s not much we can do about it now.”

As if in agreement, the static on Anakin’s communicator began to crackle for the sixth time since they’d joined back up with each other. He and Obi-Wan both turned their heads towards the running of padded feet and the click of nails on asphalt – that rapid breathing coming at them through the fog.

Both of them lifted their blasters, almost in unison, and fired two shots off at the dark shape in the fog before they could even make out the black plastic eye covers on its red-raw face. A yelp was choked off as the creature crashed to the ground and skidded, flesh scraping on the road with the force it was pushed back with.

A moment later, the mist congealed around the shape, obscuring it to nothing but a dark blot.

“Come on, let’s keep moving,” said Obi-Wan. They ran on.

Obi-Wan was out in front for most of the journey. This bothered Anakin, not primarily because of his competitive nature, thought that was probably a factor he had to admit, but because of Obi-Wan’s injury. True, Anakin wasn’t at his best either; tired and with several minor wounds. True also, it was hardly out of character for Obi-Wan to push himself like this. However, with all that blood he’d lost…

“Are you sure you’re all right, Master?” Anakin called after him. “We could probably afford to slow down, if you…”

“Need to take a break, Anakin?” Obi-Wan answered, in all good humour.

“Ha. You wish.”

_I’ve got to stop worrying about him so much_ , Anakin told himself. _I know he’s more than capable, as long as he’s conscious._

Briefly he thought back to the _Invisible Hand_ , and the wounds Obi-Wan had taken there. Had he applied the bacta treatments the healers had told him to while they’d been on route to Mandalore? Anakin doubted it. Strong in the Force or not, one of these days the old man was going to end up bedridden, and Anakin would have to make him cups of tea for the rest of his life, since using the Force for that would have been frivolous.

He managed a small smile as he ran. While Obi-Wan bedridden was definitely not something he wanted, he wouldn’t have minded endless tea-making so much if it meant the other man would take it a bit easier.

There were no words for how much better it was to be running through this fog with him by his side than to how it had been to journey alone.

Another ten minutes and three skinless dog attacks later and Obi-Wan exclaimed –

“I think I can make out that Research Station up ahead.”

Sure enough, the grey shape of a building on the edge of the lake materialised out of the fog and became more and more defined. It was a small building – smaller than Anakin had been expecting, and vaguely cylindrical with a domed top. Three storeys at most.

_What in the Force could they have been researching here?_

He and Obi-Wan came to a stop outside an alcove jutting out from the durasteel outer wall. This alcove surrounded the main entrance, and was covered in scratches and scorch marks – so many that it was hard to make out the words on the sign that read:

SILENT HILL RESEARCH STATION

**WARNING**

AUTHORISED STATION PERSONNEL   
ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT

The door was metal, plain and with a slit down the middle that would slide apart to open, like elevator doors, but there were no handles, locks, card-readers or key-pads at the entrance.

Saying nothing at first, Obi-Wan approached the door with narrowed eyes, but before he could inspect them closer a grid of blue light passed over him and in a second swirled all over him, scanning every angle. It was finished before Anakin even had a chance to call his name.

Fortunately, Obi-Wan wasn’t incinerated or made into mincemeat by this scan, but it reminded Anakin with a jolt how easily they could die without the Force to warn them of dangers like this.

“ _Personnel not recognised_ ,” a tinny, pre-recorded female voice announced from within. “ _This code violation has been logged, and will be reported to Lord Zeall at the earliest opportunity_.”

“Lord Zeall?” repeated Obi-Wan with interest. 

“Yeah, he’s popped up on my radar a few times since I got here,” muttered Anakin. “Some Sith Lord from whenever this place was built – him and his partner, ‘Lady Phanti’. I don’t know what they were trying to do here, but I’m guessing they’re the ones who created these monsters.”

Obi-Wan rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Any ideas on how we can get in?”

With the equipment they had? Anakin was tempted to try firing at the door, but from the look of it everyone else who’d come here had tried that too, to no avail. He guessed there might have been defences against entry via lightsaber too, given this place was built by Force-users, so even if his or Obi-Wan’s had been working they – ironically – weren’t going to cut it.

No, he needed to figure out how the mechanism worked if he was going to override it. Problem was, whoever had installed this security system had been clever. There was no way he could tell from the scanning process alone what it was looking for or how it interpreted information. And even if he did figure it out it might not have mattered. If, for example, it was a DNA scan they were after then he and Obi-Wan may have run to the end of their luck.

Just to be thorough he went through the process himself. The lights that scanned him were too bright at their source for him to detect much, though at least he didn’t feel a thing from them.

_“Personnel not recognised. This code violation has been logged, and will be reported to Lord Zeall at the earliest opportunity.”_

Anakin took a deep breath, and exhaled.

“There, there,” said Obi-Wan, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Not the end of the universe.”

“I can’t tell what it is they’re scanning for,” Anakin told him. “Could be a chip, DNA, retinal, or a million other things and while these can all have mock-ups jury-rigged to fool a scanner I can’t be sure they’d have what I’d need to do so on this planet, let alone in town.”

Obi-Wan frowned, as Anakin continued to peer into the black, opaque overhang the lights had come from, seeing nothing even when he held his flashlight up to the plastic.

“What about disrupting the power?” he asked. “The building must be getting some from somewhere if it can still operate this system.”

“I’d expect a research station to have its own generator,” Anakin replied. “Kriffing apartment block did.” He stepped back and took a brief look at the outside of the alcove to see if he could see any wires or anything at all for that matter running into the building. “Though in a building this size…”

“Mm. One wonders what they could have been researching in such a compact space.”

“It’s not like they were desperate for more,” remarked Anakin, thinking of how isolated this building was on the map. So far away from town or any other buildings.

There was no way they could have created the skinless dogs or the crystallised droids in this place.

Almost without thinking he walked around to the other side of the alcove, as if he could have expected anything different. By some miracle there was something – no wire or clue to what mechanism the scanners worked by, but a message, scratched on in tall, spiky letters.

_HOW DO U GET IN!_

“They left off the question mark,” observed Obi-Wan, leaning over to where Anakin looked with intent. “Very improper.”

“I knew these Silent Hill people were no good,” replied Anakin.

He scoured over the side of the alcove and sure enough found another message beneath that one.

_do you bowl?_

Anakin gestured at the answer. “He knows his punctuation – and possibly where we could find a clue.”

“He didn’t start with a capital letter,” Obi-Wan groused, sounding thoroughly unimpressed. Anakin chuckled.

“If this research station had anything to do with the experiments running around then they probably kept drugs on hand,” he said. “Where there are drugs, there are addicts who steal drugs.”

“A market supported, no doubt,” Obi-Wan picked up, “by a very helpful neighbourhood forger, who knew exactly how the security system worked and how to circumvent it.”

“… who may just have operated,” Anakin brought the map up, remembering one of the named locations on it, “out of the local Leisure Centre’s bowling alley.”

He pointed at the building on the map. It was on the north side of town – indeed, they had actually passed it as they’d run along this main road, but of course hadn’t seen a hair of it in the fog.

There was nothing to suggest that the fact the Leisure Centre may have been a starting point to breaking your way into this station back when that message had been scratched meant it would hold any clues now. However, it was a lead. Now that he knew Obi-Wan wasn’t dying, Anakin didn’t feel so bad about following leads that had this little chance of panning out.

But it was still annoying that they were going to have to run back the way they came.

“Shall we?” Obi-Wan asked him, gesturing back towards town.

Anakin had a mouthful of disgusting purified water from his canteen before answering, “Lead the way.”

With a genial smile, Obi-Wan nodded, and they took off once again.

It wasn’t long as they made their way eastward again before Anakin’s thoughts wandered. He couldn’t help but feel like he was missing something.

A bit like when he’d looked at the framed verses that gave him the clues to that stupid coin puzzle, the notion occurred that if it was Obi-Wan, he might be able to figure it out. Whatever it was that Anakin was missing – some key piece that would make everything about this place make sense.

Of course, Obi-Wan had only just got here, practically, and Anakin had only gotten to tell him about the major dangers of this place, so far as he was aware of them. It might have been an idea to actually lay out everything that had happened since he’d arrived in town.

“Feel like a story to pass the time?” he asked.

Obi-Wan glanced back at him with a raised eyebrow. “Heard any good ones since you’ve been here?”

Anakin grimaced and began the whole, annoying tale – everything from when he’d split up with Artoo at the border of town to parting with Luke in the alleyway after he’d directed him back to the ship.

They started there, since that was where Obi-Wan, who had been quietly absorbing the information Anakin relayed up to that point, finally turned around with a disapproving look.

“You sent him straight back to Jesse?” he asked.

When he said it in that tone, Anakin knew what he was getting at, but it seemed too utterly ridiculous to contemplate.

“Yes, I sent him straight back to Jesse, Master. He’s not in the least dangerous, I’m telling you.”

“Hmm,” said Obi-Wan, clearly unconvinced. “Not that I don’t trust your instincts, but it does seem rather suspicious to me, Anakin.”

It seemed rather suspicious to Anakin too, only it didn’t _feel_ like it. He wasn’t sure if he could call it the Force, it was something he’d never felt in the Force before, but Luke had been so earnest that if there was something underhanded at work involving his presence, Anakin just couldn’t make himself believe the kid was responsible for it.

Maybe it was ‘Vader’s work, or Luke’s mysterious un-dead father or father’s friend.

“I don’t think he’s dangerous, Master,” he said again. They were jogging at a slower pace now. “He is Force-sensitive, but from what he said he’s had hardly any training in it.”

“’From what he said’,” echoed Obi-Wan. “Don’t forget that without the Force we won’t be able to spot liars as easily as we’re used to.”

“So what, we should just assume everyone we run into is lying?” asked Anakin, with annoyance.

Obi-Wan grimaced. “I think it’s telling that apart from Maul, the Sith Master and these experiments, everyone else you’ve run in to has met an unfortunate end.”

“You don’t think _Luke_ killed them?” Anakin scoffed at the idea. “I told you about those notes – burning people alive seems to be more the style of this ‘old crone’.”

“But then who is the old crone? This Darth Phanti you’ve seen messages about? From what you tell me she lived far too long ago to have been responsible for the freshly burned corpses you found.”

That was true. Anakin had assumed up until now that she and Zeall had been active before or at least during the last great war that had wiped out almost all the Sith. But even if they had been part of the lineage of Bane, one of the many pairs that must have come between Maul and when the Jedi had previously thought the line dead, still Maul had implied – truthfully, in Anakin’s opinion – that he had never been here before. So they must have come before him – at the very latest one of them must have killed the other to become master to Vader, who must have killed them in turn before he started training Maul.

So how were those corpses so fresh? Either Vader really had killed them or Phanti couldn’t be ‘the crone’ – or Anakin was completely misunderstanding everything, which wouldn’t have surprised him in the least.

“It still doesn’t mean Luke killed them,” he argued. “I’m telling you – kid wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Well, he hadn’t flinched when he’d pointed his blaster at those dogs that had attacked them, but then, he was from Tatooine: he had to have at least a couple of sun-sharpened edges in him. “It’s much more likely it was Vader, if you ask me.”

Granted, he didn’t really feel that was the right answer either. But it made far more sense than it being Luke.

“All right, dear, I’ll take your word for it,” said Obi-Wan, like he was humouring him.

Anakin wasn’t worried though. If Obi-Wan did run into Luke he’d understand at once what Anakin meant, that he was sure of.

He raised an eyebrow at ‘dear’, though.

Well, Obi-Wan was probably joking. Not that he minded, really.

_Minded what? That he was probably joking or that he might not have been? Not that it matters either way – it’s Obi-Wan, after all, he’s not going to wrap you in his arms and tell you everything will be all right._

_Nor should the strongest Jedi in the galaxy need or want him to._

“I am a little interested about what you told me Maul said about what the Jedi might know about this place,” Obi-Wan continued, changing the subject casually.

“You are?” Anakin asked. “I thought it was just random gibbering on his part. Don’t tell me the Council is keeping secrets about a weird town out in the middle of nowhere where you can’t feel the Force.”

It was tempting to allow anger into his words at the thought of more brilliant decisions on the part of the Jedi Council, but frankly it just seemed to unbelievable to Anakin that the Jedi might know about this place and yet not do anything about it. There were a load of former Sith temples and strongholds across the galaxy, but they were either unknown to the Jedi, clearly marked as no-go areas too toxic to handle, or they’d been cleansed of lingering darkness for generations.

Anakin could only assume this place was in the first category.

But Obi-Wan looked at him strangely, still in good humour but tilting his head, as though the answer might be otherwise.

“It’s not something I believe the Council has that much knowledge of,” he said. “Perhaps a written account exists, deep down in the archives where the memory of its location has been long lost. But there _is_ a story told among the younglings in the creche – not surprising you wouldn’t have heard it.”

“A story?” Anakin repeated. “Like, a ghost story?”

“Very much like a ghost story,” said Obi-Wan, with a small chuckle. “And in truth, not much about it differs from any other initiates’ ghost story about the Sith and the Dark Side. A stronghold of a breakaway sect of the old Sith empire, a planet that cannot be reached by one who does not already know the way – the Sith protagonists undone by their own evil and doomed to live on only as echoes of their strongest rages, which Force-sensitives of particular awareness can still feel, centuries later.”

Sounded like a Temple ghost story. The scary stories Anakin had grown up with on Tatooine had been a bit more basic, and usually involved misbehaving slave children being eaten by one monster or another because they didn’t obey their masters.

_“Down in the basement, behind the heavy door, at the bottom of the long, dark staircase behind the locked door is the room of the Croaking Man. And you had better not wake him up, boy…”_

_That heavy, durasteel door. A softer, gentler voice, explaining._

_“There are things down there it isn’t good for you to see, little Ani.”_

He shook his head again. Twice in one day that long-gone memory had come to mind. And that was even before –

“Something wrong?” Obi-Wan asked him.

Anakin brushed it off. “It’s nothing. What made you think of the ghost story?”

Obi-Wan seemed to shrug off Anakin’s brief sojourn to sordid memories. “Only because within it a Jedi Knight of old returns from this ‘ghost’ planet with a baby girl. In the story, the girl has golden eyes even in the creche, and as she grows she sows discord among her fellow initiates. Eventually, she kills the knight who found her in a particularly gruesome manner before returning to the dark planet she was found on – never to be seen again.”

There was a not entirely serious attempt by Obi-Wan to make the events sound dramatic toward the end, but Anakin thought the story sounded rather banal, for all he he’d only heard a summary. It did seem to hold to one theme several Jedi fables did: compassion may be a sacred value of the Order, but be nice to a Dark-sider and you’ll receive only anguish in return.

Odd though, that a Jedi story would condemn a _baby_ as a Dark-sider. Obi-Wan continued in a more sober fashion.

“What was it that Maul told you? That a knight had escaped with a girl? It brought the old fairy-tale to mind, that’s all.”

There was a brief silence. Anakin wasn’t entirely sure what to say to that. It was possible there was a connection, of course, but he doubted some youngling ghost story was going to help them in the here and now. Then Obi-Wan abruptly changed subjects.

“Ah – I think we’re coming up on our target, Anakin.”

Sure enough, a building much larger than the one they’d just left loomed out of the fog. Four storeys, each one much taller than those of the Research Station or apartments, made the building almost as tall as Q3.B2 – and it was much longer.

Like the apartments, however, it was a block; grey and stained where decades of rain had collected on the edges of the windows and spilled down. Juxtaposed with this was the large, cartoonish building sign above the door, its age-dulled colours still miles brighter than the plain grey of the rest of the building – spelling out in what had once been sky-blue and sunshine yellow:

**Silent Hill  
Leisure Centre**

A logo of a deliriously cheerful-looking smiley face sat conspicuously on the word ‘Centre’, but behind the huge mounted plastic sign you could still see,

SILE NTRE

In smaller, dull black letters, though someone had made an effort at chipping them off the building.

Anakin stood back and appraised the building for a long moment. Nothing remarkable, outside of most of the first-floor windows being boarded up. That implied that someone had left the Leisure Centre with enough time to spare to take some precautions against thieves and vandals, which in turn may have indicated they’d intended to come back some day.

There were no lights or sounds coming from the building, but Anakin unholstered his blaster all the same before approaching the door. A simple, old-fashioned pull-down handle was all that seemed to be keeping the door shut, and Anakin found somewhat to his surprise that it was unlocked. He pushed the door open gently and took a step back.

Obi-Wan came forward to his side, peering thoughtfully at the easily-accessed entrance. That look of concentration couldn’t help but send a spark of worry through Anakin, still thinking of how bad the head wound had seemed in the back of his mind.

But he said nothing, knowing how much he’d have wanted Obi-Wan to do the same in his place.

“Up for some bowling?” he asked.

The older man hummed. “I think I’ll take a look at everything they have on offer before I commit,” he said.

With that, the two of them went inside.

Anakin turned on his flashlight to find that it was, like most of the Silent Hill he had seen so far, a plain and dingy space – and in this case the floor and walls were stained with black soot, and here and there were other signs of fire damage. Two couches in the reception area were partially crumbled into ash, one collapsed completely in the middle. A fake plant had turned black and melted in its pot and one of the light fixture casings had come unbolted on one side and was hanging down from the ceiling.

“You did say the Sith Master seemed to have power over fire,” Obi-Wan pointed out, observing the same ruin.

“I think so,” Anakin said. He approached a large reception desk covered in ruined computer terminals, aiming his flashlight at a once-white board behind it. Letters had been fixed on – odd to do so when you could have just displayed them on a screen, but then, the large screen they did have on one wall was smashed to pieces. The letters looked plastic, partially melted but still legible.

**ACTIVITIES**

Choose _one_ or _two_ to occupy your allotted leisure hour. Members will be treated on a first-come, first-served basis.

RUNNING   
SWIMMING  
CLIMBING  
SHOOTING  
LIFTING  
CLEANING

KRiFFiNg

Some soul of wit had scrawled that last one on in pen, apparently after the fire had damaged the board, but it was the one before that that had Anakin raise an eyebrow.

“Cleaning, huh? Let it never be said the Sith didn’t know how to have fun.”

“I know a certain Padawan who seemed to pick up an appreciation for it,” said Obi-Wan mildly. “What with all the times he brought extra chores down on his head.”

“You had extra chores that many times?” Anakin countered. “Master Qui-Gon must have had his work cut out for him.”

Mentioning Qui-Gon made him remember his dream of him from earlier though, and he was relieved when Obi-Wan let it lie there, saying –

“I don’t, however, see ‘bowling’ on the menu. Shall we try our luck elsewhere?”

Anakin turned slowly, allowing the light clipped to his chest to rove over the rest of the room.

“Looks like you spoke too soon, Master,” he remarked.

There was a stand on the other side of the room, with words in the same cheerful style as those on the new sign outside; white, on a red and blue background.

Vyshnyxx’s Bowl-O-Rama!

Th un aits on t h floor!

The second line was much smaller, and therefore had fared much worse in the fire. Anakin could infer ‘The fun awaits on the th floor!’, but of course, the actual floor number was too obscured by fire damage to make out. He sighed.

“I guess we’re going to have to check every level,” he said.

“At least it isn’t a dead end,” said Obi-Wan cheerfully.

Anakin grimaced. “If this is anything like the apartment block was then I’m going to start banging my head against the wall.”

Obi-Wan chuckled. “Don’t do that, you have a head injury already. Shall we split up and take two floors each?”

This idea did not appeal to Anakin in the least, so soon after he had regained Obi-Wan’s company in this place. But they were Jedi, and Anakin was not a clingy child anymore. He sighed.

"I'll go for the top two,” he offered. “ – can you do the bottom?"

"If you’re _sure_ that’s what suits you."

The way Obi-Wan said it made him sound dubious, but Anakin figured that was probably annoyance at the implication he couldn’t handle more than one flight of stairs. But then, to Anakin’s mind that was just what Obi-Wan got for getting injured so badly and scaring Anakin half to death.

“I’ll go to the fourth floor first,” he said. “Call for me if you run into trouble.”

“And you,” said Obi-Wan.

With a last worried look at the bandage around his old master’s head, Anakin headed to the door with the universal stairs symbol on it and went through.

*~*~*~*~*

The fourth floor was a bust. Most doors were unlocked, but aside from some antique gym equipment and a spare power pack he found in one of the few lockers that opened, there was nothing of interest to be found. On the other hand, no skinless dogs or droids with crystals growing out of cavities they shouldn’t have had came out to attack him either. 

As he moved on to the third floor there were still no bursts of static on his communicator, and Anakin was beginning to hope against hope that none of the experiments had made it into this building. Maybe they didn't like bowling?

There was a long, ash-stained corridor that he guessed had once been white. Through a transparent wall on one side he could see what looked like a shooting range, though it was difficult to tell with so little light.

But those figures, barely visible, at the other end of the long room – they had to be targets, right?

The door was locked at any rate, so it didn’t really matter.

On the other side was an opaque wall with a single door, which, to Anakin’s surprise, he found he could open easily. Even more of a surprise was that the place was relatively well-lit – though not because the power had decided to come into this one room as opposed to all the others. This side of the building had windows all the way around, and though it was pretty dim, the bowling alley on the other side of the glass was visible.

As were the two people who had also found their way there.

Opposite the dozen or so lanes leading to holographic pin-projection stands, Maul was sitting at a waiting table booth, sideways on with his back to Anakin and his legs on the seat. Luke – naïve, foolish boy! – was sat on the table, screwing something in to the prosthetic leg that was nearest him with a look of concentration that had meant Anakin’s arrival escaped his notice too.

Anakin’s breath caught, his chest contracted and he could not move. After a long moment, a soft, dark voice faded in to his hearing.

“ – not possibly expect to face him with only a few hours’ worth of Jedi party tricks under your belt. Only the Dark Side can take you to the level you need to be at quickly enough for it to make a difference. Let me teach you, Luke. Become my apprentice and I will show you how you can avenge the deaths of those you love.”

“How did you know he’d…”

“I am as sensitive in the Force as any Jedi. The Dark side is the only way.”

Luke finished up whatever adjustment he was making to Maul’s knee and pointed his own mini-driver at the zabrak with a wry smile.

“Hey, I know I look pretty gullible, Maul, but you’re not getting me that easily.” He grinned. “I think you should become _my_ apprentice in the Light Side; then we can take them on two on two.”

Maul snorted. “What did you say your father’s name was?”

It was only then that Anakin was able to release the sudden, encompassing fear that had paralysed him without the slightest warning, and kick the door open. Without thinking he took his lightsaber in hand and extended the blade – it held its shape with a strong hum as he stormed towards Maul.

“Hey!” he yelled. “You get the hell away from him!”

Luke jumped back from the table with a start, but Anakin’s eyes focused in on Maul, who turned to glare at him with more annoyance than anything else – though he seemed to take pause when he saw Anakin’s lightsaber was working.

“You again,” he muttered.

“It’s okay!” Luke cried, holding his arms up. “He’s not going to hurt me – we’re all in the same boat here – “

“We are _not_ all in the same boat,” Anakin cut him off swiftly. “This place is the way it is because of the Sith, and he is a Sith. He knows more than he’s letting on!”

“But…” Luke started, then looked around, apparently not knowing where to go from there.

However, a reason for Anakin not to go ahead and finally put Maul down was not what his eyes fell upon. Instead, glancing out the window, he suddenly peered down at the street and moved closer, zeroing in on something outside the building.

“Ben?” he said, apparently mystified.

Anakin frowned. “Luke? Is there something – ”

But Luke didn’t hear him, and ran for a side door on the opposite end of the alley.

“Luke!”

Anakin tried to run after him, but Maul vaulted over the table and unsheathed a lightsaber of his own, which glowed bright red between Anakin and the door Luke had taken no pause in rushing through, yelling out, “Ben!” as he disappeared into the shadowy hallway beyond.

Maul glanced for a split second at the open door before moving in closer. Anakin might have tried to run around him to chase Luke, but he remembered that Obi-Wan was also in the building. Maul was unlikely to be able to feel the Force any more than he could, so he wouldn’t have known his number one target was no more than a flight or two of stairs away, and injured, and Anakin wanted to keep it that way.

Now was as good a time as any to kill the bastard.

But then Maul suddenly tilted his head, like he was regarding Anakin in a different light.

“I’m… intrigued, Skywalker. You seem very concerned for young Luke.”

“Don’t,” Anakin snapped, before he could control himself. “You stay away from him, Maul. Trust me, you’ll regret it if you don’t.”

“Oh, I don’t think anybody should trust _you_ , Skywalker, least of all that child. No, he’ll be quite all right on his own.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?” Anakin asked him. “That kid, alone out there with your former Master running around? With _you_ running around?”

Maul’s eyes narrowed. “I’d be more worried about yourself in that regard, Skywalker. Tell me, did you get a chance to talk with Miss Tano before you left Mandalore?”

Anakin’s expression must have given away the answer, because after a single beat Maul went on.

“Hmm? And what did she tell you about our little chat?”

At first Anakin said nothing, yet something inside him was compelling him to answer, and at length he replied, “Nothing she wasn’t comfortable telling me over a holo-transmission.”

“So, not everything, then,” Maul commented, confirming what Anakin had already suspected. “Interesting.”

That was the moment both their saber blades retracted into their hilts, seemingly of their own accord, and Anakin barely resisted the urge to throw the damn thing against the wall – or at least at Maul. Maul himself made a soft hissing noise before putting the hilt back on his belt and taking a step back.

“If you’re really so worried about Luke, you should go after him, shouldn’t you?” Maul said, faux-casually. “Unless there was something else you came here for…?”

Anakin followed Maul’s gaze to the reception desk, behind which was a small, wall mounted cupboard with an open door. Inside the cupboard were a number of small hooks, each with their own label – and that was all.

“You were late, Skywalker,” Maul told him with a smirk. “Our young friend got here first.”

It took a moment for Anakin to understand what he meant, and then his eyes widened. The key, or whatever it was that was needed to get into the Research Station had been on one of those hooks – and Luke had taken it.

“What? Why would he… I told him to wait for me at the transport!”

Looked like it was Ahsoka’s trip to the Citadel all over again. Anakin groaned with frustration and glared at Maul like he was the one who had told Luke to do this and for all he knew, he was.

“What’s in that Research Station?” he snarled.

Maul glared back. “What do you think?”

Nothing good then. Anakin’s fist clenched around the hilt of his lightsaber and his teeth ground together. Capturing Maul had been the whole point of their coming to this awful planet, and Maul was standing right in front of him. Anakin had been a Jedi more than long enough to know how his priorities were supposed to work, and Luke’s safety, a possible hyperfuel source and whatever else was lurking in the Research Station should have been put aside to wait so he and Obi-Wan could finally deal with this murdering psychopath.

There were two of them and only one of him, after all. Without the Force the bastard had no chance.

But.

Something inside of Anakin tugged, like a barb caught in his chest pulling him to follow Luke. _Trust your instincts_ , he’d always been told, and perhaps he was growing used to whatever interference was blocking the Force. Vader could use it here, so he knew it was possible.

Any other Jedi would probably have stayed to do their duty.

“This isn’t over, Maul,” Anakin growled at him.

Then he turned and ran back out the door.

He _knew_ it was wrong. Much as he told himself Maul couldn’t get off the planet with a broken ship – with all ships in the vicinity that he knew of broken, still it was his responsibility as a Jedi to make sure any out-of-control Dark-siders were dealt with so that they could no longer cause suffering across the galaxy. He may even have been doing Luke a favour in the long run – assuming Luke wasn’t killed by Vader while he dragged Maul back up to the transport to stuff him in that Mandalorian box.

But then, who was he kidding? He wouldn’t need the suppression chamber to hold a _corpse_.

Still, something in his stomach was twisting, telling him to leave Maul and follow Luke, and he raced down the stairs as fast as he could to try and cut him off. Kid was speedy, but Anakin had been trained by the best, after all.

On the first floor he almost crashed into Obi-Wan coming into the stairwell, whose face he managed to glimpse a somewhat troubled expression on before their eyes met. But, true to form, he ran right past him.

“Anakin?!” Obi-Wan called after him just before he followed suit.

“Luke has the key!” Anakin shouted back. “He left through a back door – hurry, or we’ll lose him in the fog!”

Obi-Wan hurried – he was much closer to Anakin when he remarked, “Didn’t go back to the transport like you asked him to, then?” with all the faux-surprise Anakin would expect from him in this situation.

“Guess not!”

“Did you see where the back entrance led?”

They hurried past the burned chairs and out onto the street. “Nope!”

“Why didn’t you go the same way, then?”

Anakin stopped.

It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d lied to Obi-Wan if he did it here. Sometimes it felt like he spent half his life lying to Obi-Wan. Here though, he simply couldn’t think of any other excuse. He took a deep breath.

“… Maul’s up there. But, Master – I really think we need to go after Luke. I don’t know if I’d say I felt it in the Force, but I do feel it.”

Obi-Wan scrutinised him for a long moment, his face impassive. Anakin’s heart sank and he began to prepare for the oncoming lecture, if Obi-Wan even deigned to take the time to give him one instead of heading back up to face Maul without even another word. However...

“Then let us go after your young friend.”

Anakin did a double-take.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

With a small smile, Obi-Wan put a hand on his shoulder, and let it linger, saying with great weight: “I trust you, Padawan.”

Anakin could barely believe it.

A strange thing pulled itself apart inside him. At one end he couldn’t overstate just how much Obi-Wan’s assurance meant to him. On the other, he thought of the look on Dooku’s face as he stared up at him, holding up his stump arms when Anakin executed him. The two feelings stretched away from each other with painful insistence. If Obi-Wan ever knew just how much he shouldn’t trust his former student…

But it wasn’t like _Obi-Wan_ would ever have anything to fear from Anakin. Just those who’d try to hurt him, or any other innocent person. It was better this way, then, wasn’t it?

Anakin swallowed, then nodded, and Obi-Wan squeezed his shoulder a little harder, patted it, and continued running – headed off around the corner to the street Luke had been looking at from the third floor. Anakin had to put in an extra burst of speed to catch up.

_Focus on the moment_ , he told himself. _Find Luke, find the key to the Research Station. Hopefully figure out the mystery of this place – it’s not like Maul was going to tell you what’s there outside of ‘bad stuff’._

As they made their way past the adjacent side of the Leisure Centre Anakin found himself looking up at the long panel of glass along the third floor. To his surprise, he could see Maul clearly, standing right at the window and peering down. Even from this distance he could make out the gold of his eyes.

And despite what he might have feared, Maul was looking down at him, and not Obi-Wan. The expression of pure rage he’d seen the Sith use before in that context was totally absent, and in its place was… pensiveness. Maybe even anxiety. Obi-Wan didn’t seem to notice though, so Anakin tore his eyes away and ran faster.

Ahead of them the street disappeared into fog, and there was neither sight nor sound of Luke. Anakin took a moment to wonder idly what the hell the kid had been thinking – never mind not going to the transport as he’d had the feeling would be the case, but sitting and chatting away with Maul? Helping with his prosthetic maintenance?

_That ball of fluff he was trying to feed has more sense than that kid,_ Anakin thought. Even though he hardly knew Luke, he had a gut feeling this was the case.

This musing was interrupted when he saw the beam of his flashlight drop away ahead of him.

“Watch out!” he yelled.

Obi-Wan came to an abrupt halt, just before he would have run straight off the edge of a cliff. A few small chips of gravel were propelled forward with the motion and tumbled pip-pip-pip down the rocky side. A gust of wind followed as Anakin came up beside him.

Like the one he’d seen earlier, right on the way that led back out of town, there was a gigantic hole in the road with no visible bottom. Smaller than the first, the evidence of the devastation that must have caused it was no less striking, as the pit stretched right across the road and into the nearby buildings, which had partially collapsed on both sides, wires and rusty pipes sticking out of the edges. The other side of the hole was also obscured by the fog.

Anakin sighed with relief. “Another one,” he said, nodding towards the precipice.

Obi-Wan raised his eyebrows and leant forward, inspecting the crater.

“Yes, I see,” he said mildly. Then he knelt down, getting a closer look at the edge. “I have to say, it doesn’t _look_ like cannon damage.”

“What do you think caused it?”

“Impossible to tell from here,” said Obi-Wan, “but if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say there was something going on below the surface, and the road collapsed into it.” He looked back up at Anakin. “No way to tell, unless you go down.”

The thought sent a chill down Anakin’s spine. “I don’t think Luke would have risked it.”

“No,” agreed Obi-Wan. He paused, looking at either side of the street behind them, then pointed left. “That way looks much more promising.”

On the left side of the road, the last building before the ground had started to fall away was a grey brick shop with wooden-boarded windows. The door had a transparent panel in it, and there was a graphic of a cup with steam rising out of it printed in the centre along with the lettering:

**Big Bralla’s Blends**   
  


… with the caption beneath:

**_“A Taste of Slow-Roasted Perfection!”_ **

A quick scan of the area told Anakin this was the only door Luke could have gone through – the others were all boarded over.

He followed, but unfortunately although it was accessible, the door was still locked – a keypad card-reader combo set up beside it. Rolling his eyes, Anakin unhooked the wrench from his belt so he could smash through the glass and hopefully open it from the inside, but Obi-Wan caught his arm.

“Allow me, Padawan.”

Anakin rolled his eyes again. “By all means, Master,” and gestured for him to try whatever trick he had to get past the lock.

No ‘trick’ was needed; Obi-Wan simply pulled a key-card out of the pocket in his sleeve and waved it in front of the card reader until it beeped.

There was a loud click in the lock on the door. Obi-Wan reached forward, and pushed it open, then turned back to an incredulous Anakin, brandishing the card with a smirk.

“Tea club,” he explained.

_Tea club!_? Anakin stared. “You just carry that around with you everywhere?!”

Obi-Wan gave him a serious look. “One never knows where one will find a branch registered with their points scheme. And, as a Duratitanium Member, I am afforded the highest level of access in any of their partner establishments.”

“But this planet is out in the middle of nowhere – there was a Sith stronghold here!”

“The Tea Club is a very ancient and prestigious – “

“ – and prestigious institution, I know,” groaned Anakin. “Honestly, let’s just catch up to Luke while we still can.”

He didn’t have to look to know Obi-Wan was chuckling at him as they moved into the caf shop.

By now it was no surprise to see that the place had been trashed; chairs and tables overturned or broken, crockery smashed, framed holo-snaps caved in and thrown off the walls and a layer of dust and dirt over everything. Above the counter there were – or rather had been – boards displaying the café menu in bright colours with pictures of increasingly complicated looking drinks faded with age, but the mount these boards were on had been almost entirely pulled away from the wall, hanging down over the counter by a single screw and revealing that, just like with the Leisure Centre sign, this had been put up over a previous menu that spoke of an earlier, more sinister era of this town’s history.

Behind the colourful menu there were three black boards stapled into the wall, but only the one on his left had anything on it; at the top, in harsh white letters –

BLACK CAF – 0.5 CRED

Anakin gave the board a low whistle. “These Sith caf places may not have much choice on offer, but you can’t say their prices aren’t reasonable.”

Obi-Wan followed his gaze with a raised eyebrow. “I don’t know if I’d say that before actually trying their caf.”

“I’ll let you be the one to test that out if we find any, Master,” said Anakin, dryly. “For science. Come on, let’s go.”

For all the rush he was in Anakin couldn’t help but feel a little lighter. Ridiculous as Obi-Wan could be when it came to tea, Anakin never forgot that first morning they’d come back from Naboo when he’d tried to make a cup for his exhausted Master for the first time. Of course, the equipment in their quarters on Coruscant, simple though it was, was leagues ahead of the junk he’d been used to working with on Tatooine. Obi-Wan had woken up not to a ready-made cup of freshly brewed tea, but to a kitchen covered in appliance parts Anakin had been studying in order to familiarise himself with their inner workings. He remembered his smile, and the gentle, _‘Shall we have breakfast in the canteen this morning, Padawan?’_

Whatever else had happened between then and now, he thanked the Force again that Obi-Wan was at his side for this, even if he still worried about that head wound.

The door leading into the back was already open, and past a staff room were a set of stairs that led out onto a fire escape – also easily opened from the inside. A great relief, considering the absolute headache Anakin had had to go through to get to the fire escape of Q3 B2.

Out the back they found themselves on another of Silent Hill’s main roads, and a fog that actually seemed as though it might be thinning in the midday sun. Or perhaps it was pure luck that he could look across the street to the huge, red building behind a wire fence and see the glimpse of bright orange dashing up the stairs to the main entrance.

“There – Luke!” he shouted.

Luke showed no sign of having heard him, and disappeared inside the building a moment later.

Anakin ran faster to the outside of the fence but stopped at the gateway to the front courtyard, feeling a sudden sense of foreboding. He looked back at Obi-Wan, finding his old master regarding him with a curious look.

“… he went inside,” Anakin said, lamely.

Obi-Wan smiled the same gentle smile he had fourteen years ago. But it seemed different this time. Probably because of the blood-stained bandage around his head, or the blood-red robes. Or the hole in the Force.

“Let’s go after him then,” he said simply, walking casually towards the door.

The scratched sign on the outer wall read:

**SILENT HILL MED CENTRE**

*~*~*~*~*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Throughout the story I've sprinkled little bits of dialogue from SH2 as an homage. Unfortunately, because this is a stupid /serious/ fic, I really couldn't find a way to work in my absolute favourite exchange from the game. But, for all you SH2 fans, I'm going to give it to you here anyway. Behold!:
> 
> Anakin: Luke, wait! Damn it. Maul, come on – let’s go after him!  
> Maul: What, Luke? But why? He said he was fine on his own.  
> Anakin: This town is FULL of monsters! How can you just sit there and eat PIZZA!?  
> Maul: *shrugs* *eats pizza*
> 
> I have to admit, while it was a wretch not to put Obi-Wan in Maria's outfit, the real struggle was not to put Luke in Laura's. I'm sure all my fellow SH2 peeps agree he would have been cute as a button...
> 
> Also, the coffee shop sign caption is really just Silent Hill being a dick to Anakin, lol.


	8. Med Centre

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, guys! Here's another chapter of this thing - hope you all enjoy it!
> 
> In this installment, Anakin and Obi-Wan explore the Silent Hill Med Centre after a brief check-in with Jesse, meet some familiar looking 'faces', find some more creepy notes and end up having to split up again on account of Obi-Wan's head wound.
> 
> We also delve a little deeper into some of Anakin's previously mentioned 'hang-ups', so that'll be fun.
> 
> Many thanks to those who have left comments, kudos, or who are just enjoying the story. Your comments in particular are a big help, and I'm eager to hear what people think of this latest piece.

Even only after a minute of examining the hospital waiting room, Anakin regretted his decision to come here.

This always happened. He did things without thinking. Or without thinking enough. He let his emotions control him and when he realised what he’d done they only swirled harder inside him. Normally he’d be able to release at least some of it into the Force, but as he observed the nearly empty reception desk, empty chairs, dusty floor and fake plants he couldn’t help but feel the first stirrings of something uncomfortably like panic.

_Jedi Knights don’t panic_ , he told himself angrily. _Chosen Ones don’t panic_.

His very first meeting with Master Yoda now hovered near the surface of his mind. _I sense much fear in you._ He’d never thought of himself as a fearful person before then and rarely did now, but sometimes…

He should have tried to incapacitate Maul back at the Leisure Centre, it was the whole reason they’d come here. He could have tried to find Luke afterward. He should never have just come here, not even knowing why, when that mad dog was still on the loose.

And he was supposed to kill the Sith Master. The Master who could use the Force when he couldn’t. It all seemed absurd now he was thinking about it.

“Looks like we have five floors to search.”

Obi-Wan’s voice cut through his internal whining sharply, a double-edged feeling of comfort and guilt left in his wake. But Anakin focused on his words quickly and looked to where the red shadow of his clothes stood out against the grimy white room.

Light came in through gaps in the boards of the windows dotted around the walls, but it was dim enough that Anakin switched his flashlight on as he approached, seeing for himself the large floor plan detailed on the wall where Obi-Wan was standing.

The Med Centre had four floors and a basement level, the building a square-horseshoe shape made up of many different wards and treatment centres. The map was filthy, more so than the rest of the room by far, in a state of affairs that seemed almost deliberate to Anakin – there were many room names and numbers that were obscured by some black, oil-like substance.

Anakin took a deep breath. “I guess we’re just going to have to go floor by floor.”

“Basement first?” asked Obi-Wan.

“Sure.”

Obi-Wan’s eyes narrowed. “Are you all right?”

_Come on, keep it together. He just told you he trusted you five minutes ago; do you want to act like you can’t handle things already?_

“I’m fine,” Anakin sighed. “Just tired. Should we try and get an update to Jesse before we go further?”

“That’s probably a good idea.”

“Okay. I’ll try and get him outside, I seem to get better results in the open air.”

As Anakin jogged back to the front door he was struck by a sudden fear that the door had locked behind them – like this was a cheap, predictable, scary holo-film and he and Obi-Wan were being tormented by the malevolent spirits of Darth Phanti and Darth Zeall.

But the door opened without issue, and Anakin told himself he was being an idiot once again. Rolling his eyes, he made sure his communicator was on the setting that had given him the best results previously.

“Jesse? Jesse can you hear me, over?”

There was a small amount of static and a long pause.

“… s that you, General Skywalker?”

Anakin sighed with relief. “Thank goodness. Listen, Jesse, I’ve met up with Obi-Wan, and we’ve gone back to the Med Centre to follow a lead. The Sith are still in the area but I think they’re more interested in us, so I want you to stay where you are for now, over.”

“Right you are, sir.”

Anakin hesitated before his next question. He didn’t want to sound like he was pushing, given how stressful this must have been for Jesse, but he needed to know –

“How are the repairs coming along?”

“All going well, sir,” said Jesse, brightly. “No unforeseen complications. Should have everything in order by the time you get back.”

“That depends on when we get back, doesn’t it?” asked Anakin with a brief laugh.

There was a pause on the other end of the line.

“I have every confidence you’ll be able to get yourself out of there in a timely fashion, sir. You always do.”

He supposed that was true. Still wasn’t sure how Jesse was calculating their expected arrival now, but then again Artoo was with him, and Artoo had his own way of figuring these things out. More importantly,

“Thanks. How are you holding up there, Jesse – did you manage to get some rest?”

“You could say I had a few winks, sir.”

“Well don’t worry about having a few more if you need them. This place is swarming with Sith activity and now it looks like Obi-Wan’s going to be okay, we’re going to stay and try to figure out what’s going on.”

_But what is going on?_

It had been bugging him for a while now, but any way he looked at it, Vader’s actions didn’t make sense.

Why had he let Anakin live and why had he brought Luke here? Was he planning to use whatever was blocking Force-sensitivity in Silent Hill against the Jedi? What was his end goal?

“Understood,” Jesse told him, which made one of them at least. “Just tell me I won’t have to start picking out the curtains for our new home, sir.”

Anakin managed a laugh. “Not yet. Oh, one more thing, Jesse – that civilian I told you about? His name’s Luke. He crashed here too, and he seems to know something about the Sith Master. I did try to send him your way but this kid… I can tell he’s going to be a handful.”

“Sounds like someone we know,” Jesse remarked.

“Yeah,” said Anakin, with a more sombre laugh. The Ahsoka he’d seen a few days ago hadn’t seemed like her old, snippy self. “Anyway, on the off-chance he does decide to take my advice and head your way, don’t shoot him just yet.”

“I like to think I know exactly when and when not to shoot someone,” said Jesse.

The air around him changed somehow. Anakin couldn’t tell whether Jesse had said that light-heartedly or not.

But before he could answer, Jesse went on, “Though it must be difficult for a general, when people don’t do as their told. Good soldiers follow orders, after all. People running off and doing their own thing just gets… messy.”

Silence descended.

There were a lot of things Jesse could have been referring to there, but the thing was, he sounded _off_. Not his usual self. The first culprit that came to Anakin’s mind was Maul, and whatever havoc he’d wreaked with the clone back on Mandalore. Force mind tricks didn’t usually leave any permanent damage, at least not to his knowledge, but who knew what a trained Sith could do?

Another reason he should have killed Maul fifteen minutes ago. Now he felt suddenly unsure.

“You know me, Jess,” he tried, dropping the second syllable from his name without thinking. “I don’t mind it so much.”

“No, sir,” agreed Jesse. “Though you might say even you had your moments. But I’m talking nonsense, aren’t I? Must have hit my head hard on the way down, eh, sir? They’ll have to send me back to Kamino for a touch-up when we leave the system, if I’m not careful. And we don’t want that, do we?”

_… what?_

“… no? I… Jesse, if you need us to come back – ”

“A single clone isn’t important, sir,” said Jesse insistently. “You get back to saving the galaxy. It’s up to _you_ now, isn’t it? Over and out.”

“Jesse – “

The crackle in the background if the call disappeared, and Anakin stood there in the doorstep of the Med Centre, in the fog, staring at his communicator.

Something was definitely going on. He wanted to run back to the transport there and then to make sure everything was all right, but –

“Finished your call?”

Obi-Wan came up behind him and raised an eyebrow as if to say Anakin should really have come back into the Med Centre by now so they could find Luke and get into that Research Station.

“I…” Anakin started.

He knew what Obi-Wan would say to his concerns, that they couldn’t afford to go back for Jesse now while the fate of the galaxy was at stake, but how did they know that? They didn’t even have the Force here. Now he knew Obi-Wan wasn’t about to drop dead of that head wound he had no idea what kind of timescale they were looking at.

“What is it?”

“I… I’m worried about Jesse, he – “

“Oh, yes, I know what you mean. He’ll be fine, dearest, it’s only some residual effects from Maul’s earlier meddling. It’ll clear itself up.”

That was a huge relief to Anakin, but he still picked up on, “ ‘Dearest’? You _sure_ you’re okay, Master?”

“Quite,” said Obi-Wan with a small chuckle. “It’s you we should both be worried about. You’ve had such a hard time lately, Anakin, I’ve been worried. Are you sure you want to do this now?”

“I’m ready,” Anakin assured him, knowing he was lying as he said it. Outside of this place Obi-Wan would have known it was a lie and called him out on it in a heartbeat.

“Then let’s go forward.”

… but here he had clearly made some resolution to trust Anakin no matter what, and Anakin’s heart sank even lower under the weight of yet another lie.

_When this is over, I’m going to tell him everything_ , he said to himself, for the umpteenth time.

_Everything._

_“He’s too dangerous to leave alive.”_

_“ – slaughtered them like – “_

Anakin exhaled and, figuring he owed Obi-Wan the same kind of trust when it came to Jesse, followed him back into the Med Centre.

*~*~*~*~*

OUT OF ORDER

The two Jedi stared at the sign on the door to the stairwell with disbelief.

“ ‘Out of order’!” Anakin exclaimed. “How can the _stairs_ be out of order!?”

Obi-Wan walked to the adjacent elevators calmly.

“This one is still working,” he said.

Anakin stared incredulously. The elevator was working? He hadn’t seen any sign of power getting to this building: not a single light – except the one inside the elevator, as it turned out when Obi-Wan pushed the call button and the doors opened.

“I don’t believe it,” Anakin sighed. “This place is such a kriffing headache.”

Obi-Wan smiled at him and patted his shoulder. “You’ll be all right, Padawan.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Anakin muttered, but even as he did, Obi-Wan suddenly flinched, and brought his hand up to his head where the blood stained the bandage, rubbing it. Anakin’s heat stuttered a little. “Are you okay, Master?”

“Mm,” Obi-Wan hummed. A beat passed and he tilted his head from side to side. “Just a small headache. I’ll be fine.”

“All right,” Anakin said.

But he was still worried. He’d felt the pieces of skull _move_ the day before. And he hadn’t seen the updated readout from the med droid about Obi-Wan’s condition; knowing Obi-Wan it could be far worse than he was letting on and there was nothing Anakin could do about it.

Although, they _were_ in a Med Centre…

“We’ll see if they have anything around here that might help that Artoo wasn’t able to carry back,” he said.

“You’re such a worrier,” Obi-Wan said fondly. “I really am fine, you know.”

“I know.”

They stepped inside the elevator to find a pad with five buttons all in a single column, 4 at the top, B1 at the bottom. But only 1, 2 and 4 were lit. Anakin hoped at first that the light around the button simply wasn’t working, but when he pressed ‘B1’ nothing happened. He pressed it again a few more times because he was like that, but still, nothing happened.

“Awesome,” he said. “Do we stay on the first floor, then?”

“It seems like the thing to do,” agreed Obi-Wan. “Although, we could split up?”

“Not this time, Master,” said Anakin. “I have a bad feeling about this place.”

Even though he was the senior general between the two of them, Obi-Wan nodded graciously and gestured for Anakin to proceed him out of the elevator. They would come back when they’d finished searching the first floor.

This access point to the other floors, or in-access point as it was for the most part, had been just through the door by the centre floorplan they’d been looking at. Opposite the locked door to the stairwell was the door leading into the rest of the first floor, a pitch-black corridor full of many rooms.

Given how quiet it had been so far, Anakin was almost completely unprepared for the burst of static his communicator gave off when as soon as he opened the door.

Fortunately the apartment block had taught him to treat that noise as seriously as he would a warning from the Force, and his blaster was in his hand in an instant.

“Shit,” he hissed. “Those things are in here.”

Obi-Wan drew his own blaster. Seeing his old master aim the weapon low, as though expecting a dog-attack, Anakin aimed his high, in case it was a crystallised droid. However, it was neither.

There was a horrible crunching sound, like smashing pottery, and two figures came gliding towards them out of the darkness. Expecting the black of the droids or the red dogs Anakin was shocked to see mostly white, splattered with brighter colours.

For a moment, he thought they were clone troopers.

And it wasn’t a surprise that he did. The figures hung from thin steel cables attached to their spread arms that pulled them across the ceiling like cars on a ski lift, in armour that was very much like a clone’s at first glance. At second, there were some obvious differences, mostly in the helmet, which had a different, less Mandalorian-inspired shape and more noticeably a face that made no sense. Instead of one strip for a visor and one running down to a mouth, the helmet had a bizarre, three-pronged slit with triangular ends. The thing that made it really weird was that it was at a tilt – one slit going up the forehead, the other two going down the cheeks. There was no way anyone could see out of that helmet.

The other thing was the bright colours. Clones in the GAR that made it past the ‘shiny’ stage normally decorated their armour; usually along a company theme, often in bright colours like Anakin’s own boys in blue. Most clones weren’t expert artists, but they were careful with their armour, it was a matter of pride for them – pride and fellowship with their brothers.

These two looked like they’d each had a bucket of paint or two haphazardly thrown on them – the one in front splattered with neon pink and yellow, the one behind a luminous turquoise. The colours glowed like they’d been at some ridiculous underground rave, but they were also filthy – streaks of black dirt all over them.

To Anakin’s mind, this was a blatant mockery on the part of the Sith, and his feelings went from shock, to horror, to anger very quickly.

Yet he still hesitated before shooting.

Obi-Wan, on the other hand, did not. He raised his blaster coolly and fired it off twice in quick succession calling, “I’ll take the front one!”

The pink-yellow figure jerked back sharply on his cables, but recovered, and in the same moment the turquoise one launched itself forward at Anakin, who was still too reluctant to shoot it. When it came at him he finally did fire off a blast, but the momentum still carried the thing forward.

Its arm jerked back, more like it had been pulled by the wires than of its own accord, and was then thrown forward, hitting Anakin on the shoulder where the burn he’d gotten earlier was still healing and throwing him to the ground.

“Anakin!”

Pain blossomed where it struck him and then along his back where he fell, but the bigger shock was the _weight_ of the fake trooper that followed him down. It was heavy, probably another droid, though there was something weird in the way it moved, the way it sounded…

He tried to kick it off himself but the weight was too much, he could barely keep it from covering him completely. There was a noise coming from its helmet too, like it was hollow and there was something rattling around inside it, clicking – he couldn’t see anything even with the flashlight shining right in the slits of its helmet and then there was a flash of metal flickering out towards him.

Anakin jerked his head out of the way just in time when the knife stabbed at him. Undeterred, the blade retracted back inside its face and then stabbed out again from another one of the slits, toward where Anakin’s head had moved to, making him jerk it sharply in the other direction.

Obi-Wan had been shooting it in the back this whole time, but Anakin saw the other one launch itself at him and cried, “Look out!” just in time for Obi-Wan to dodge it, while the one on top of him clipped the shell of his ear with its face-blade.

While Obi-Wan re-focused on the fake clone that was attacking him, firing his blaster three more times, Anakin was finally able to manoeuvre his arm around to fire a shot into the thing that was pressing down on top of him. It spasmed, making an awful, inorganic noise like breaking crockery, but it was soon trying to stab at Anakin’s face again, rolling its head around click-click-click.

Anakin fired again but it was difficult to keep his arm in the position it needed to be to do so with the great weight of this creature on top of it. And even in what had to be only a few seconds of lying there, the thing seemed to get heavier and heavier. He felt like a child crushed by the weight of a fully grown man.

Like…

Suddenly there was an enormous crash beside him, and Obi-Wan appeared over him, grabbing the figure and pulling it with all his strength. With their combined power they were just able to pull it back enough for Anakin to fire at it more easily.

All in all, it took seven shots from Anakin’s blaster for it to stop moving, added to however many Obi-Wan had unloaded into it. The sound of shattering pottery echoed through the corridor, and the arms that seemed to be held up and controlled by those wires dropped down. Anakin and Obi-Wan heaved the creature off him, and Anakin stood up, staring in astonishment at it.

“What the _hell_?”

Its back was broken. Not in the sense of its ‘spine’, but its armour had cracked and fragmented, and Anakin could see why it had sounded like pottery breaking because the outer shell of this thing looked like it was _ceramic_ in nature. And inside…

Inside, there was nothing. No circuitry, no wiring.

Nothing.

Nothing but more paint, the same colour as what covered its armour, pouring out rapidly onto the grimy centre floor.

Obi-Wan threw his arm out in front of Anakin and herded him away – from that, and the same pool spreading beneath the pink and yellow coloured one.

“Careful,” he said. “We don’t know what’s in it.”

Anakin nodded and looked down at himself, letting out a disgusted exclamation. “Ugh.”

“What?”

“Some of that crap spilled out onto my tunic. Smells like it’s just paint though”

“We don’t know that it is.”

“It smells like the paint the clones use to paint their armour,” Anakin said, more insistently. “This is the Sith Master’s doing, he’s made these things look like the clones to taunt us, he’s _mocking_ us!”

Obi-Wan frowned and stroked his beard thoughtfully. “Well, if that’s what you felt when you saw them then that’s probably evidence enough that it’s the case.” He sighed. “The armour on these ones seems to be much tougher; it took me eight shots to drop that one.” He nodded towards the pink and yellow mess.

Then he peered at Anakin again, head tilted.

“They’re not clones, Anakin. If there are more, we have to be ready to handle them.”

“I know,” growled Anakin. “And I know they’re not clones too. I can handle them – it just… makes me angry.”

He expected the usual advice. Instead, Obi-Wan put a hand on his shoulder.

“I understand,” he said. “Come on, let’s try opening some of these doors.”

It made Anakin feel lighter. He didn’t know what to say, so he just nodded. Obi-Wan turned to try the first door on the right, but then he turned back almost immediately.

“It didn’t hurt you, did it?”

“No,” Anakin said, rolling his shoulder around a bit. “Might have a bruise, but that’s all. I think it nicked my ear as well.”

“Do you have any bacta?”

Anakin paused, considering whether it was worth using any.

“Yeah, but I think we can save it for now.”

Obi-Wan didn’t argue. Instead he glanced up, and Anakin followed his gaze, angling his flashlight at the ceiling. There were no tracks there that the cables holding up those fake clones could have run on – just plain tiles. The cables had just been floating in the air of their own accord, then.

There was something very wrong with that. It didn’t make any sense whatsoever.

But Anakin was still a little shaken, and couldn’t even begin to think about how this was achieved. Had Vader just used the Force to manipulate these things? Why?

It was just… confusing.

Nor did Obi-Wan make any comment or speculation of his own. He just startled Anakin out of his thoughts when he pressed the ‘enter’ button on the first door on their right. By the sound of the resulting buzzer, entry was denied.

“No luck,” Obi-Wan confirmed. “Something you might put your innumerable skills to, my Padawan?”

Anakin rolled his sore shoulder out once more and walked to the door to take a look at the lock. More sophisticated than the ones he had seen at the apartment block – controlled from a systems mainframe if he had to take a guess, and without hacking that mainframe they weren’t going to get in to any room the computer had locked. As he hadn’t brought anything suitable with him for a wireless entry, they were going to need to find a terminal somewhere. Unless…

“Something you might be able to blast open, Master?”

But Obi-Wan shook his head. “I’m afraid one stray shot hit the first door on the left and barely scratched the surface. We won’t be getting in by force.”

“Re-enforced durasteel then,” Anakin exhaled softly. “I couldn’t tell in this light. We’re going to have to get into the building mainframe somehow.”

“Well, at least we know Luke wouldn’t have been able to get in to any locked doors either. We should try every door regardless to see whether the computer might have left some of them open.”

“Mm,” said Anakin.

Before he had the chance to say anything else the static on his comm started up again and the high-pitched sound of a rolling clay pot accented with the screech of tearing metal came wailing around the corner. Both Anakin and Obi-Wan turned to find another suit of fake clone armour gliding towards them from the end of the corridor – this one drenched in neon green and light blue.

Anakin’s anger flared up again, seeing this parody of one of Rex and Jesse’s brothers used against them.

This time they both fired at once, Obi-Wan four shots and Anakin three, each hitting the suit one after the other at the same spot. The two spots cracked open almost simultaneously, shards of whatever ceramic and great gouts of paint splashing to the floor. On the last shot from Anakin, the thing fell forward with a crash.

The static died away a few moments later. The suit had almost got within striking range however, even though they had been firing at it as soon as it had come around the corner. These things were much tougher than the others.

“Do you think there’s any more of them?” Obi-Wan asked.

“In the corridor? We should be okay if there are, as long as the charge in these guns doesn’t run out – though I did find a spare for mine. It’ll be trickier if there are open rooms and we find them inside though.”

“Yes, I see what you meant. Even so, if you still want to find Luke…?”

Anakin nodded. “I’m definitely not going to leave him now.”

Luke had seemed capable, but after being surprised even Anakin and Obi-Wan together had struggled against these latest obstacles.

Obi-Wan smiled and nodded, then tried the next door along the right side of the corridor – which, to both their surprise, opened. They exchanged a look and crossed over the threshold.

There were thankfully no fake suits inside the cramped, tiny room beyond. Already small, it was made smaller by three walls of shelving, containing only a chair, desk, and rows upon rows of old-fashioned medical books. The computer terminal in the room had been smashed to pieces – irreparable without a lot of custom parts Anakin doubted they had the time to search for.

There was also a long white doctor’s coat on a hook, and, thinking of the robes he’d found on the mannequin in the apartment building, Anakin searched through its pockets. A moment later, he pulled out a key card.

“Here’s something,” he told Obi-Wan, who was scanning the books.

Obi-Wan glanced over. “Good work, Anakin. Does it say anything?”

“SH Clinic,” Anakin read off the card. “Silent Hill Clinic? Sounds vague. Anything worth reading?”

“I don’t think so, I’m afraid. What about the desk?”

Anakin walked around and started pushing buttons, but none of the drawers moved. Only the middle one – no shutting mechanism, just your regular low-tech slotting in to a gap – opened, and the only thing inside it was a cardboard folder, held together with an elastic band. When Anakin removed the band, three sheets of paper of equal size slipped out onto the desk, along with one smaller note. He reached for the papers first.

_Patient: 00013453_

_Name: REDACTED_

_Planet of Origin: REDACTED_

_Species: Human_

_Age: 19 Standard_

_Sex: M_

_Notes: The patient’s delusions centre around the belief that he is an agent of justice for a higher power, and that those who attempt to hinder his efforts to bring ‘justice’ are agents of a second, malevolent power who controls the world as we know it today. As the primary obstacles between himself and ‘justice’, as he sees it, he is frequently violent towards staff and visitors alike, though it is perhaps noteworthy that for the most part he is surprisingly gentle with his fellow patients. It is believed his history as a victim of sexual abuse has played an integral role in the development of these fantasies._

Anakin winced. Handing the first page to Obi-Wan he read through the others, which followed the same format.

_Patient: 00013521_

_Name: REDACTED_

_Planet of Origin: REDACTED_

_Species: Human_

_Age: 42 Standard_

_Sex: M_

_Notes: A second major depressive episode has caused the patient to be readmitted in the hopes that it will avoid any further suicide attempts. The patient has proved unable to cope with the pressures of a high-stress job before, but continues to return to the same line of work in order to meet the expectations of his family. Although there had been an improvement to the patient’s outlook in the last few years, his intense feelings of inadequacy and failure have been exacerbated by the recent birth of his children – who he feels are better off without him as a father. This patient is expected to respond well to institutionalisation, as he has in the past._

_It is the trappings of his everyday life outside the more regimented wards that time and again have proven his downfall._

_Patient: 00013564_

_Name: REDACTED_

_Planet of Origin: REDACTED_

_Species: Muun_

_Age: Unknown_

_Sex: M_

_Notes: The patient was admitted for classic symptoms of pyromania following an incident in which eleven people were killed in a fire he started. Though it is not believed the deaths of the victims were his intention when he started the fire, he must be kept under constant watch to ensure he does not gain possession of any fire-starting materials, no matter how low-tech. Though he is otherwise non-violent, his constant, almost fetishistic focus on the subject of fire in therapy confirms that he remains a danger to society and likely will be so for the rest of his life._

Leaning over his shoulder to read these, Obi-Wan frowned. “It sounds to me like all three of these patients were admitted for psychiatric reasons. I didn’t get the impression this was a psychiatric institution from the outside though. What does that smaller note say?”

Anakin unfolded the smaller bit of paper.

_Doctor the locked box is EMPTY the Wise man has taken her golden hair he wants a golden baby if we want to get the key we have to go into the basement to fix the machine but I don’t want to I don’t want to I don’t want to I don’t_

Beneath that, in a different hand, someone had written –

**He MUST Be STOPPeD**

It was underlined twice, with an arrow pointing to the first part of the note, though Anakin couldn’t tell if they meant it was the ‘Wise man’ or the person who had written of him who had to be ‘stopped’.

This was the second time he’d read a reference to the ‘Wise man’ since coming here though, and while he felt like it could be important, there was just no way to know who this person was as far as he could see.

_Zeall? Vader?_

“Very illuminating,” said Obi-Wan dryly, taking Anakin out of his thoughts. “Shall we move on?”

“Yeah, we should probably pick up the pace,” Anakin agreed. “I definitely feel like Luke is in the building somewhere, but...”

Obi-Wan gave him a curious look. “Sounds almost like a connection through the Force,” he remarked.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Anakin. “I met him for the first time yesterday – I’ve had two conversations with the kid. You’d think the fourteen years we’ve known each other would have given us a stronger connection than one I was able to form in a day.”

“I’d certainly hope so,” replied Obi-Wan.

He smiled, but his face seemed… intense, somehow. Probably from disapproval at the thought of Anakin forming an attachment to this mysterious boy.

Then again, maybe it was just the lighting. Everything looked more sinister under a flashlight.

Most of the rooms they found on the first floor turned out to be locked. Not a big shock at this point. Anakin had taken a holo-snap of the floor plan with the capture function in his communicator and marked off the locked rooms as they went, at Obi-Wan’s suggestion.

The next open one was a store room, but there was very little of use among the boxes of spare light bulbs and meal trays – though Anakin did find another compatible power pack for his blaster. What that was doing in a med centre storeroom was anyone’s guess, but as they had to bring down two more painted suits after that, Anakin was grateful.

Around the corner, in the shorter section of the corridor, they found fewer doors on the left side – indicating one, larger room. When they tried the door it was locked, but when Anakin waved the key-card they’d found in front of the lock there was a click, and a higher-pitched beep.

He and Obi-Wan exchanged a look and Anakin pointed his flashlight at the sign next to the door, discovering that the ‘SH’ in ‘SH Clinic’ did not, in fact, stand for ‘Silent Hill’.

**SEXUAL HEALTH CLINIC**

Anakin clicked his tongue with disapproval and rolled his eyes. Obi-Wan was, of course, amused.

“It’s an important part of medicine, Anakin.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“I’m serious. There’s nothing to feel uncomfortable about.”

“Ugh.” Really.

As if Obi-Wan didn’t know that _sexual health_ was one of the last things any Padawan wanted to discuss with their Master, even after they’d graduated the Padawan stage. Too many times had he seemed to take petty delight in tormenting his Padawan by assuring Anakin over and over that he ‘could ask him any questions he wanted’ and ‘didn’t have to be embarrassed’ about the subject. There was no end to the amount of embarrassment Anakin had felt on his behalf.

“You’ve always been so sensitive about this,” Obi-Wan said with a chuckle. “Though I suppose it was a relief I never had to check your room for secret caches of _illicit materials_ you’d hidden away like other Masters did with their Padawans.”

“Please stop talking.”

Obi-Wan laughed, putting a warm hand on his shoulder, but then his expression suddenly became pensive and he cocked his head.

“You’re not still upset about those videos you had to check for the star charts, Anakin?”

Anakin said nothing.

“Dear one, it was only pornography – “

“One of them,” Anakin interrupted, “was… was really bad.”

“Well, don’t dwell on it,” Obi-Wan told him – much to Anakin’s surprise. “You’re all right now, and if we do run into any more illicit materials, I can assure you I will be very happy to look over them for you.”

“Oh, really, Master?” asked Anakin, smirking. “Yeah, I’m sure you would.”

One part of him still wanted to protest that some of what he’d seen couldn’t be joked about, but he pushed that feeling aside because it was rare Obi-Wan gave him a break from analysing negative feelings so he could ‘let them go’, and things here were stressful enough as it was.

Still, Obi-Wan didn’t roll his eyes at him this time like he normally would, only kept smiling like he was very much in on the joke. It was the side of his Master he had seen more often since graduating from his Padawan days, when he was among the men. That stern teacher who would have rebuked Anakin definitely still made regular appearances, but Anakin liked to think that this was more the direction their relationship was headed in.

Silly as it seemed to think that way, when things may well have been coming to a close for him on this planet.

He was glad Obi-Wan was there. Even if it meant he too would be in danger.

In danger of looking at porn, anyway, as they entered the room to find the walls plastered with filthy images on paper… what did they call them? _Prints_ – that was it. Literally filthy prints as well, as with much of the rest of the building there were black streaks all over the pictures, but most of them had at least some part of an obscene act visible.

Anakin groaned in disgust and turned to face the entrance, while Obi-Wan patted him on the shoulder.

“There, there,” he said – still sounding amused. Anakin just shook his head.

“I’ll guard the door,” he declared.

True to his word, Obi-Wan began removing the prints from the walls, where they’d been stuck on with some kind of temporary adhesive. He said nothing, probably focused on examining the images for clues, and so Anakin was left to try and clear his head for a few minutes.

It was a tall order. Obviously all this filth could be blamed on the Sith – as he understood it they had no issue with exploring their _passions_ , whatever those may be, and while the history he’d been taught told him the more powerful ones tended to lose interest in such things as they became obsessed with power for its own sake, that only described the ‘cream’ of the Sith crop. There would have been acolytes and even slaves of whatever breakaway sect ended up here that were suspect in Anakin’s opinion.

…

He _tried_ to understand it. Not the Sith, obviously, but the normal people who weren’t bothered by this kind of graphic imagery – sought it out even, and not only in images. He remembered Padme, very early on in their relationship –

_“What are you doing?”_

_She was halfway down his body, and snorted. “What does it look like I’m doing, Ani?”_

_“Don’t.” He crossed one leg over the other._

_She seemed taken aback, and cocked her head. “Why not?”_

_Why not… In all honesty he was surprised she’d tried something like that, and he stumbled over his answer._

_“It’s not… It’s not_ romantic _,” he settled on. “Lips are for kissing. Not_ that. _” He pulled her up to eye-line. “Besides, we should always be on the same level.”_

_Laughing, she dove forward into his embrace. “Ani, you’re so precious.” Then, grinning, looked him in the eye. “But we don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”_

Her saying that had been a huge relief, but it still bothered him afterward that she’d tried to put her mouth on him there, like… well, like a normal intimate relationship on Naboo, as it had turned out. With their marriage a secret there was no one he could go to to talk about what happened with Padme when they were alone – and it wouldn’t have been appropriate for him to do so anyway. Fortunately, Chancellor Palpatine had picked up on there being something on his mind when he’d next had a moment with him, and fortunately the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic paid attention even to what was ultimately a trivial concern.

Yet, though he was the most powerful man in the galaxy, at the end of the day the Chancellor was a human being. Who else did _he_ have to talk about normal things with? He’d explained that what Anakin had seen as… well, _obscene_ , was not only normal on Naboo to the point of being depicted in historical works of art, but pretty much everywhere there were humans or other species with similar sexualities. Though of course being Palpatine, he had gotten everything across very delicately.

He’d also suggested the nature of Anakin’s distaste for these things in a way that made sense.

Anakin was born of the Force itself – so it seemed – and even if that wasn’t the case his connection was still stronger than any other being known throughout the galaxy. His connection to what the Jedi referred to as ‘crude matter’, therefore, might be naturally less than that of normal people and even normal Jedi. While there was a spiritual side to an act of love with Padme that he certainly enjoyed, acts of pleasure for the sake of bodily pleasure were, Palpatine had theorised, a step away from the true peace that was in the Force – and on some level Anakin must have been able to sense that.

This was something Anakin tried to remind himself at times like these. Not that they’d often walked into rooms plastered with smutty pictures over the years, but most people were freer about this kind of thing than he was, and it couldn’t be avoided.

By the time Obi-Wan finished gathering the prints up, he felt he was ready to approach this like a Jedi again, and silently thanked Chancellor Palpatine for everything he’d done for him.

“Hmm,” Obi-Wan said. “Well, it’s a bold proposal, if nothing else.”

Anakin turned as little as he was able to and still see Obi-Wan, who caught his eye with a smile and gestured towards the back wall. Trusting him, Anakin turned the rest of the way.

The prints were all gone, but removing them had uncovered a message daubed in black on the wall.

**we are all sick**

“Ugh,” said Anakin again. “Did you find anything useful, Master?”

“Here,” Obi-Wan held up a print. “Don’t worry, this one’s rather tasteful.”

Reluctantly, Anakin took the print and flipped it over. It wasn’t too bad on first glance. The image showed a large room with many long tables and benches. On the nearest table was a naked, human body, back to the viewer. They were slim in a way that obscured their gender from this angle, and their head hung over the side of the table, obscuring it further. The light made it difficult to discern the colour of their messy hair. They were somewhat out of focus, truth be told.

Also on the table were two glasses of red liquid and a number of cards that looked like the key card they had used to get into this room. Anakin frowned.

“Looks like a cafeteria,” he said. “Do you think it’s a clue?”

“There is a cafeteria on the map,” Obi-Wan recalled. “On this floor. Might be worth a look?”

Anakin checked their holo-snap. “There’s another stairwell on that side of the building too,” he said. “Hopefully that one isn’t ‘out of order’.”

Obi-Wan chuckled.

But then suddenly he winced and brought his hand up to his head, and Anakin’s heart dropped through the floor.

“Master?”

“Mm.” Obi-Wan held a hand up as though telling him to wait. His face was contorted into an expression of pain, and in the next moment, he staggered. Anakin reached out for him at once, looking around the now bare room and finding a door on one side with a pane in it through which he could see a bed. He put Obi-Wan’s arm around his shoulder.

“Hang on, Master,” he said. He hoped he sounded calm.

_You absolute idiot_ , he cursed himself. _He had his skull broken yesterday – what the hell were you thinking letting him go with you around this kriffing nightmare!? You know how careless he is with wounds! You should have sent him straight back to the transport._

_If he dies, it will be your fault._

Thankfully the door to the smaller room opened, and he heaved Obi-Wan through and on to the bed, heart pounding for reasons that had nothing to do with exertion. It was a crappy cot with a thin pillow and no blanket, but Obi-Wan sighed with relief to be lying down, and Anakin pressed his canteen to his lips, encouraging him to drink.

Obi-Wan grimaced. “… awful…” he muttered.

“I know,” Anakin said gently, taking the wad of prints and putting them face-down on a small trolley. “Purification at its finest.” He didn’t ask if he was okay.

“I’m sorry, Padawan,” Obi-Wan murmured. “I’ll be all right after a short rest.”

“I’m going to see if I can find anything around here that can help,” Anakin told him firmly. “With what happened to you yesterday I don’t want to take any chances.” He heaved an annoyed sigh. “Their technology isn’t that dated – they must have a basic med-droid somewhere in the building that can run a diagnosis.”

He turned towards the door, thinking of how big the med centre was and how long it would take him to traverse it. But in the next moment, Obi-Wan grabbed his wrist.

“Stay.”

Anakin froze.

“Stay with me, Padawan. I don’t like you… going out there alone…”

“Master,” Anakin began hesitantly, pulse racing for reasons he didn’t want to dissect. “I don’t want to take chances with your health. Honestly, you’ve been kind of weird since you got here, and I – “

He was cut off abruptly. Obi-Wan tightened his grip and pulled _harshly_ , and Anakin found himself falling onto the small cot in front of his master, with an impact that seemed to ring in his ears.

For a long time, he said nothing. Obi-Wan pressed himself against his back and, finally letting go of his wrist, wrapped his arm around Anakin’s waist.

“Stay.”

The word was whispered right into his ear. Anakin felt a lock of hair flutter.

“You need to rest too.”

Obi-Wan’s voice was soft, but didn’t leave room for argument. Anakin breathed in and out a few times, as the warmth seeped in from behind him through their clothes. A lot of warmth. What if Obi-Wan’s wound had become infected and he had a fever? Anakin needed to find a med droid.

However, the arm around his waist was insistent. The moment he tried to make a move, it tightened.

“Shh,” Obi-Wan told him.

How long had it been since they’d last lain like this? Seven, eight years ago…

“You’re not well, Master,” Anakin said quietly. “I need to see if I can find something to help you.”

“Shh.”

Echoes of feelings from another time came flooding back to Anakin as he lay there on the flimsy cot. Before the war, before the responsibilities, before all the lies that twisted around inside him all the tighter with his master’s arm around him. Stupid, childish feelings.

Obi-Wan was hurt. He needed to go and find help.

But Anakin lay there, moving hardly a muscle, until Obi-Wan had fallen asleep.

*~*~*~*

There was no blanket in the room but Anakin fetched the coat they’d found before and draped it over his old master’s shoulders, frowning anxiously at the bandage around his head. Part of him wanted to inspect the wound, but he didn’t want to risk waking him, and would hardly have been much help anyway. As Obi-Wan and Padme often griped, his go-to solutions of ‘lightsaber’ and ‘fighter’ didn’t work for everything.

… Obi-Wan had always said as much. Why hadn’t Anakin listened? Why had he been such a terrible student all these years?

Well. He couldn’t change the past.

And he was having nerve-wracking doubts as to whether he was going to be able to do much about the future. One of the visible labels on their snap of the floor plan was the Droid Storage, but unfortunately it was on the third floor – inaccessible via the elevator. Anakin tried to run around to the other side of the building where there was apparently another staircase, but on every floor he could reach, there was a set of heavy locked doors in between him and the other side of the building.

The painted suits made more than a few appearances as he ran through like a womprat with its head cut off.

As he was reaching the end of his tether he ended up punching the door to the ‘out of order’ stairwell on the fourth floor. To his surprise, it opened, and he soon saw why that stairwell was out of order: there weren’t any stairs.

Just a long, black pit at the edge of a short stretch of floor.

There was, however, another door to his left.

**Roof Access**

It was something. Maybe if there was more than one point of access he could walk along the roof to get to a part of the building that he couldn’t access from the inside – like how he’d used the fire escape to get around the forcefields in the apartments.

But once Anakin had raced up the stairs to the door in question he was disappointed – the area of roof that was actually accessible was tiny, boxed in by rusted yet sturdy chain-link fencing, which he supposed made some kind of sense. If it was a psychiatric hospital, there was no telling what an escaped patient might do if they managed to make their way up here.

There was a door in the fencing that led to another part of the roof, but it was locked. Anakin groaned in frustration and would have just kicked the fence and run back down to keep searching for a way to help Obi-Wan, if not for something in a corner of the fence catching his eye.

A sheaf of papers. Anakin frowned and picked it up – by the look of the tattered pieces of string along the binding it had been ripped out from a larger book. A little longer and a little narrower than Anakin’s hand, he pried the sticky red pages apart, but for the first seven couldn’t make out anything that had been written there.

Only one page was legible – only just. Much was obscured by the red stains, but if he squinted he could make out most of it.

Anakin hovered his flashlight over the paper, peering at the blurry, inked shapes.

_‘The damage to the subj____________ r is extensive, though approximat_________________ east older than three years. Most ________________s been addressed through the use of mechanical prosthetics, although to anyone professing ________________________ in this day and age it is clear that this has not____________ ficial. Foremost on this list is certainly the device that assists the subject’s breathing – though as a non-bio-cybernetics specialist I cannot make an entirely informed assessment on the quality of __________________at even as long as forty years ago, good practice would have been to graft_________________ not a non-________ prosthetic. Although the subject has______________________________elief that every breath would leave this man in agony – and from the look of the scar tissue around what remains of the original lungs__________________st twenty years._

_All of the subject’s limbs have been replaced with prosthetics, all of surprisingly poor quality – given his high status within ______________f the right arm, which seems____________________cular note include the visible skin – ninety-three percent of which has been exposed to wh____________________ f having suffered third-degree burns, almost certainly at the same time as the other injuries. It appears no attempt was ever made to address these burns with skin grafts either. Damage t___________ tentially other sensory organs hav_____________________but partially fused to _________________________________________ also, one facial scar of _________________haps seems insignificant, but I believe is worth noting._

_At some point between now and the time the limbs were lost, further sections of flesh were removed on the left arm and leg, to be precise, the ________________________________________ wever I believe it is likely the tissue experienced necrosis due to lack of proper care. More recent damage accrued during _____________ includes ____________________________ the face _nd __________________________________________________sychological assessment is not practical at this time, due to the need to keep the subject sedat__’_

Stiffly, Anakin turned the page over, to the last paragraphs of the macabre entry.

_‘At this point___________________ wonder what has kept this man alive for the past twenty years? These prosthetics seem hardly sufficient outside of stop-gap measures, yet all evidence suggests they have been his primary life-support system for at least that long. How? Even if one takes int_____________________________________________________ the pain alone should be debilitating to the extent of paralysis, never mind the ___________________________ ppears to be no function within the suit or cybernetics to manage the pain levels, only to stave off infection, and even these ___________________________________terally start rotting in the suit on more than one occasion. This man should be dead, yet he has been kept trapped _______________f dying for what I must assume is at least two standard decades. Why would the E________ keep his greatest asset thus? Why does he allow himself to exist in such a miserable state? He ______________________ state-of-the-art medicine in the galaxy. So why must this suffering continue?_

_Perhaps I have already delved too far into melodrama for the purposes of an official medical account. To meander ____________________ral philosophy, a subject I profess no learning in, seems egotistical. Yet I cannot help but wonder if my superiors, were they to understand the extent of the subject’s agony, would have mercy enough to push harder for his immediate execution – or if those pushes would lose momentum, in the desire to see him suffer more for his crimes.’_

Anakin’s brow lowered as he finished reading, a cold, hollow feeling growing in his chest. _Nothing useful_ , he told himself, yet he found it difficult to dismiss the words out of hand.

Why was this diary here? Was the criminal mentioned in the account brought to the town’s psych ward for evaluation? But it said plainly that that would have been impossible…

Why was the paper shaking, when there was no wind?

It was muggy outside, and letting the bloody diary slip from his fingers Anakin looked up at the cloud, to where at least some, minimal light was coming through. Maybe he should check in on Jesse, see if he seemed more like himself than –

He turned around.

Vader was standing behind him.

…

Before Anakin could touch the blaster at his side Vader had grabbed him with the Force, pulling Anakin towards him and squeezing his neck at the same time.

Then, like he had pulled back a whip to strike it forth with an even greater blow, he shoved Anakin back into the chain link fence with tremendous strength.

Anakin crashed into it helplessly, whereupon it collapsed, sending him tumbling off the side of the roof.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anakin: I'm sure this diary about a terrible criminal with an assisted breathing device has no relevance whatsoever.  
> Vader: *stealth mode* Surprise, motherfucker.  
> Anakin: *as he flies off the roof* Why didn't I hear him breathiiiiiiiiiiiing!?  
> Me: A good question - for another time.
> 
> See you all on Boxing Day, probably!


	9. Doll House

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope everyone had a good Christmas! Thank you for all your kudos and comments, or just for sticking with the story for nine chapters - I'm glad people are enjoying it! Please do leave your thoughts in a comment if you'd like!
> 
> In this chapter we have a good old-fashioned flashback-dream sequence, Anakin runs around in a panic trying to fix things for convoluted Silent Hill-type reasons, and we have the return of a certain character - hint: he's been doing that a lot lately, or so I've heard...
> 
> >>>

_Eight years ago, Anakin had fallen through the ice on Yrinst, a planet in the outer rim on the other side of the galaxy from where he’d grown up._

_It had been his own stupid fault, of course – trying to chase after a target that was much lighter than himself, but the shock of it had been such that Obi-Wan hadn’t even tried to give him a lecture afterwards. That was what it took to get something through his thick skull, it seemed – a close brush with death or similar permanent injury._

_He hadn’t known the ice would reform that quickly. Obi-Wan had probably warned him when they were taken to the island on the frozen sea, and he probably hadn’t listened, so it was his own stupid fault._

_Night, and the faint light from the stars failed to penetrate the ice after it closed in over his head. He used the Force to propel himself up to the surface, the water sending searing pain throughout his body, and couldn’t understand why he couldn’t break through to the top again – his hands numb in an instant, not realising they were pressing against the ice._

_Anakin floated there in pitch blackness, no weapon, no rebreather._

Your lightsaber is your life _, Obi-Wan had always told him._

I’m sorry, Master, you said we had to give them up to the guards on our way in – that we had to respect their laws. I’m sorry, Master.

I’m sorry.

_His one lifeline was the link he had with Obi-Wan. Only a few metres away he felt his panic bounced back at him as a deep wave of concern, as the waves below buffeted him against the ice. Obi-Wan was without his lightsaber too, but in his mind the voice at least came through the barrier between them._

_“Anakin!”_

_For a long, long moment he felt himself drifting, stuck in a single spot in a singular kind of pain. The Force seemed clearer to him then, but it didn’t help him use it to break free. It was just there, as it always was, in him, in the water, in the collection of threads and motion that he felt around Obi-Wan, as he sent through all his power in the Force to break the ice around Anakin while keeping himself above the water._

_Obi-Wan was good at that kind of thing._

_Then there was a faint light. Out of the water the air froze his eyelashes to his cheeks so it was difficult to open them, but that was because he was_ out of the water _, pulled back into awareness as abrasively as he’d left it by his Master, who wrapped his arms around him tightly in the snowy air._

_“Anakin? Anakin, Can you hear me!?”_

_“… Master…”_

_“Oh, thank goodness. Anakin we have to get you warmed up, do you understand? I’m going to take you back to the hollow – hopefully no one will bother us there.”_

_“… the hollow?”_

_The island they’d been on was a prison colony – to which they, as ‘Jedi sorcerers’, had soon found themselves consigned by the local Government of Yrinst. That had been the plan though, as they had expected to find their target on this island. The Yrinsi were a primitive people – or ‘less technologically developed’, as his Master insisted he spoke of and thought of them._

_Anakin could manage the first, but the second? When they were being locked up for_ witchcraft _?_

_Well, not ‘locked up’ so much as marooned. The whole island was surrounded by ice not quite thick enough to walk across in the depths of winter – and prisoners were left to mostly fend for themselves, with occasional supply drop-offs from the mainland. After one of their fellow islanders had offered Obi-Wan the princely sum of nine death sticks in exchange for being ‘given’ Anakin for the night, Obi-Wan had deemed it best they find somewhere out of the way to make camp, while they searched the island for their target by the dwindling daylight._

_But it had snowed almost non-stop the three days they’d been there, and though the Jedi robes were warm, the hollow of a beach-side cliff was not protection enough against the cold. With a fire being too attention-grabbing, Obi-Wan had put Anakin in his lap each night like he was a child and huddled against the wall of their little home away from home._

_Anakin recognised the walls now, as he was dragged inside, Obi-Wan pulling his clothes off as he went. He hadn’t even realised he’d been fighting him until that familiar voice, tinged with worry even as he tried to remain his usual calm self, spoke out –_

_“Anakin, please – I need to get them off or you’ll freeze to death!”_

_But Anakin, stubborn far beyond what was good for him, whined and thrashed like a scared animal at a vet’s._

_“I’m sorry, Anakin,”_

_And then, he was asleep._

_Dreams of darkness came to Anakin then, then and now and so many times in between. Darkness and flames. Even then, the future that had been promised was looming._

_He had vague memories of being enveloped in a softer fire, a press of bare skin against his bare back where for the previous few days there had been woollen robes between them. He hadn’t felt that kind of heat in a very, very long time._

_Perhaps that was why after they’d returned he’d…_

_“ – Master Windu is a very accomplished Jedi, though,” he told Palpatine, nodding to himself. “I always try hard to listen to his teachings.”_

_“Really?” Palpatine asked with interest, as he handed him his glass. “I always thought he was an uptight, pompous twit.”_

_Anakin spat the wine he’d been given right back into the glass whereupon a few drops splashed back up into his nose and he tried to blow them out while making the failing attempt not to laugh._

_“Oh, dear, I am sorry,” said Palpatine, passing him a napkin. “No, I shouldn’t say anything ill of Master Windu, you’re quite right.” He paused. “… although I’ve found my ability to nap with my eyes open has come in very handy during my meetings with him in the past.”_

_That didn’t help Anakin stop laughing. “Chancellor,” he groaned. “Master Windu would definitely know if you were asleep during a meeting – I know you don’t fall asleep in them.”_

_Palpatine sat back in his tall chair on the other side of the table, smiling fondly. “No, no, I tell a lie. But in any case I’m not interested in what Master Windu has to say on the matter – I want to know what_ you _think, Anakin.”_

_Now that he was put on the spot, the urge to laugh faded, and Anakin was left feeling rather self-conscious._

_“I only started learning about how things worked today, sir,” he protested. However, since he’d been asked… “I can’t believe, even in the whole galaxy, that there are that many cases to investigate.”_

_The nice woman who had given them the tour around their offices had given the statistics as one who had memorised and had to repeat them over and over. There were forty thousand investigators into child sex abuse on the holonet working for the Republic’s child protective services, plus another two hundred and sixty-five thousand throughout the galaxy affiliated with local Republic and non-Republic governments who exchanged information with those they’d visited._

_There were between thirty-five and fifty billion accounts on the holonet that were suspected by the AI filtering system of perpetrating acts contravening online child protection laws. Each investigator took up to six standard weeks to build a case against a suspect. Then there were the court proceedings to get through. Then there were average prison times of six to eight years for those who were convicted. Then there were the appeals._

_Then there were the ones the AI didn’t catch in the first place. The numbers were just impossible to handle with the system they had in place._

_“Mm, well I’m afraid it’s a big galaxy,” said Palpatine with a sigh. “If we look at the numbers the system projects, it’s only one in every two hundred and fifty thousand citizens who will commit this kind of crime. But this is a galaxy of trillions, and fighting this kind of thing is no easy task.” He sipped his own wine. “It’s much the same problem we have with the slave trade.”_

_“We can build a billion police droids, can’t we?” Anakin asked. “We could make the whole system automated for a fraction of the cost and time.”_

_“Ah, but what about the rights of the accused? The constitution is very particular about these things, Anakin.”_

_Anakin frowned, looking down into his wine. “Well, someone should do something,” he said._

_“Let me give you a gift.”_

_“ – definitely don’t want to rile the locals up too much. We don’t want Obi-Wan to have to go to prison again.”_

_Obi-Wan glared at him but before he could say anything Rex asked mildly, “Does the General not do well in prison, sir?”_

_“He does too well. When we got sent to that prison colony on Yrinst for being Jedi sorcerers, Obi-Wan had become the reigning death-stick kingpin within three days – “_

_Fives laughed heavily into his caf and Jesse thumped his back a few times while he coughed, but the look on Cody’s face was the real priceless one. Obi-Wan just shook his head._

_“ – he was running the whole island by the time Master Vos came to pick us up. Ask him if you don’t believe me.”_

_“Sometimes I don’t know where I went so wrong with you,” Obi-Wan sighed._

_Anakin cocked his head and grinned. “Aw, we all know you love me really, Master.”_

_It had been a beat and a fond look after that before the bomb went off._

_“Young Skywalker, you appear to be having particular difficulty with Master Kerela’s teachings. What is it that’s bothering you?”_

_“I’m sorry, Master Mundi. I don’t understand… why would Master Kerela wish for us to strike our masters down? Did she fall to the Dark Side?”_

_“No, no, Skywalker. Let me explain.”_

_“I’m here now. Waiting for you.”_

Anakin opened his eyes.

It took a few moments for the pain to make itself known, and then it was in his head, his shoulder, his ribs, his knee – the list was starting to sound like an old nursery rhyme for children learning which parts of the body were which.

But after a concerted concentration on all these different places he came to the conclusion that nothing was broken. He’d been lucky – Vader had thrown him through a skylight and he’d landed on the third floor, instead of falling all four floors down to the concrete below. Anakin staggered to his feet.

“This is where I wanted to be anyway, asshole!” he yelled up at the hole he’d fallen in from. “So thanks!”

However, in his head he was wondering, _why didn’t he follow me down and finish me off?_ in defiance of his grandstanding _._ Breathing heavily, he was almost too grateful it was so to really dissect what Vader’s motives might be. Didn’t he want Anakin, the Jedi Knight who had killed his apprentice, dead?

Shaking glass out of his hair, Anakin fumbled for his flashlight. Because of the hole he could see a little using the light outside, but barely. It was dark out there now, and what might have been one of the two moons he’s seen orbiting the planet on the way in was so heavily obscured by fog it could just as easily have been a hanging lamp. Blinking, he wiped the blood from the cut that had re-opened on his forehead.

Thankfully his flashlight had also survived the fall, and Anakin was very relieved to detect no sign of vicious Sith experiments trying to kill him. This was about a second before he remembered –

“Obi-Wan…”

He felt in his sleeve for the key to the clinic he’d left him in. It was still there – hopefully Vader wouldn’t –

_Idiot, he has a functioning lightsaber! What kind of barrier is a kriffing door going to be!_

It was dark outside, so hours had passed. Anakin didn’t spare the issue any further thought, turning straight for the corridor with the elevator and stairwell and stumbling along as fast as he could.

Both proved to be locked. Anakin tried to activate his lightsaber in order to slice his way through, and that didn’t even flicker. Trying to access their bond through the Force brought him nothing – a smothering brick wall. With a growl of frustration and something much deeper than that, Anakin realised he had no choice but to try and find another way out.

He’d left Obi-Wan alone, unconscious from his head wound, no more than a couple of floors away from the Sith Master. He was a fucking idiot.

“Focus on the moment,” he muttered to himself. “Do what you have to do to get back to him. It’s all you can do.”

With a final attempt to stretch out some of the agony that was in his body, he started pressing buttons for doors.

The first was locked.

The second was locked.

The third was locked.

The fourth, however, opened, and as it did his communicator buzzed with the now-despised sound of static.

“Oh, come on,” Anakin moaned.

Out of the dark room beyond came not one, but two painted suits – one drenched in pink and blue, another in lilac, with a single large blotch of orange on its side. Anakin fumbled for his blaster and backed away from the two of them to get a better shot, focusing on the purple one’s head first, then the pink-blue.

With each blaster shot he was able to stall the suits’ movement for a second or so, backing up as he went to keep himself out of reach. He supposed in one respect it was fortunate that it was only after the pink-blue one’s helmet cracked open and spilled obnoxious, bubble-gum paint everywhere that his blaster started making a pathetic humming noise instead of actually firing at the things attacking him.

The battery had run out. Great.

“Fuck!” snarled Anakin, and tossed the thing aside in a fit of pique. As he unclipped the wrench from his belt the lilac painted suit lunged forward, headbutting him sharply; the blade inside its face slicing out at Anakin’s mouth and nicking his lip. The helmet against his forehead hit him hard enough that he tripped over broken glass and fell backwards, his head ringing in agony.

He swept out his legs to try and pull the suit down using that momentum, but it hung firm from its wires. However, Anakin did seem to startle it, and because of that it hesitated while he was able to get the wrench and strike it with every last ounce of strength he possessed.

The jaws left a long scratch across its torso, and Anakin doubled down after using the pause this gave him to jump to his feet, bringing the wrench down on the suit’s helmet over and over.

He was lucky that every hit made it hesitate, given how strong these things were. But he managed to get in seven more blows and its head cracked, whereafter it crumpled to the floor, the shattering noise echoing off the dark walls.

Anakin didn’t celebrate, what was left of his right arm in agony from putting it through this strain after he’d just fallen on it. He grit his teeth hard stifling a whimper, and limped over to his blaster again, panting heavily.

“Piece of junk…” he growled.

With only the light of his flashlight, and his vision swimming and blood running into one eye every other moment, it was not easy to fit the blaster with a new power pack, but at least he was rewarded with the contents of the room he’d managed to open the door to:

An empty, padded cell.

There was nothing in this room but two chains bolted into the far wall, with padded cuffs dangling from each end.

_So this was definitely a mental hospital_ , thought Anakin. _Should come in handy, since it feels like I’m going kriffing nuts._

After running his flashlight over the whole of the room he determined there was nothing of value inside, and went back out into the hall.

Where was that droid storage room again? Anakin checked the floorplan, marking off the few rooms he’d tried once he’d gained enough mental awareness to match them up with their corresponding location on the plan. Round the corner… damn it.

The side of the building that had been shut away on every other floor. Fuck.

_Come on_ , Anakin told himself sharply. _You’re a Jedi Knight. Would Obi-Wan start swearing and acting out if he was in your shoes? Would Qui-Gon?_

No, they would have gotten their shit together and rescued him. Anakin was supposed to be the kriffing Chosen One, so he could damn well do the same.

He decided to forego opening every single door on his way and head straight for where the droids were supposed to be, just in case they were accessible. With three deep breaths he was on his way, running as best he could into the dark.

By what had to be a miracle, Level 3 was the only floor where the blast doors between the different sections of the building were open – though not all the way. They were stuck just far enough apart for Anakin to slip through, and while a wiser person might have feared they’d suddenly snap shut on him, Anakin was supposed to be a Hero with No Fear.

_If they do slam together on me there won’t be much time to regret my decision._

They didn’t, and the look of the corridor was much the same on this side of the doors so far as Anakin could tell – he didn’t stop to admire the bare, grey walls for long. Droid Storage was two doors down on his left.

Except the actual sign on the door said:

**ECT**

Anakin didn’t know what those characters meant. Beneath that, someone had left another message in black.

****_Thief!_  
He stole the precious hair she gave us  
what will we do without it? 

Must have meant the Wise Man who had taken ‘her golden hair’ according to the note from the first-floor office. For the second miracle of the day – the door opened. He only hoped now there was something inside he could work with.

Well, there was something inside. Anakin raised his blaster immediately, heart racing.

Droidekas.

Row after row of standard Separatist droidekas.

Anakin threw himself out of their line of fire, hugging the wall, but after a short wait there was no tell-tale clunk of one of their limbs against the linoleum floor as they moved into position, and after that no blaster fire came through the doorway, or the wall. Anakin waited longer, to see what the droids might do.

The answer, was ‘nothing’. As the silence continued Anakin poked his head around the corner, observed the rows of perfectly stationary droids, then ducked back in case his movement activated them. After another few seconds of no sign of life from inside, he determined it hadn’t. He raised his blaster again and walked back into the doorway.

_Droidekas? Separatist activity after all? Then again what’s a bigger indication of Separatists than the Sith Master himself running around?_

Why Vader would be keeping a room of these in an abandoned insane asylum was anyone’s guess though. Anakin tested the machines a few more times before he felt comfortable enough to walk into the room, whereupon he had a realisation that had him take his wrench off his belt and slam it into the casing of the nearest droid.

These were the droids in ‘Droid Storage’. Not med droids. These things.

So this little venture had been a complete waste of time. Anakin almost screamed in frustration, thinking once again of Obi-Wan, completely helpless and unconscious in an unsafe room, and counting on him to come back.

Not for the first time today the thought occurred that Obi-Wan was dead already, butchered while Anakin had been unconscious, and Anakin just didn’t know because he couldn’t feel the Force.

_It didn’t turn out to be true the last time,_ he told himself. _So focus on the moment and get a move on. Where do you go from here?_

At first, he wondered if the only way forward wouldn’t be to search every room on the third floor. But then, since this section wasn’t cut off like it was on the other levels, couldn’t he get to the other stairwell and at least back to the right floor?

He was about to run there directly when something caught his eye on one of the droidekas in the back row. With most of these clankers he wouldn’t have been able to remove one of their weapons to take with him in less than an hour, but this one droideka had a custom rifle attachment that a second glance told him he’d be able to detach without much of a problem.

It was bulky and he didn’t have a recharge unit compatible for that model, but he could see it packed a much stronger punch than the antique blaster. He released it from the droideka and found to his relief that it still had the strap needed to make it more readily portable, which he fitted over his shoulder. His second firearm since he arrived on the planet.

_Weren’t you supposed to be a Jedi Knight?_

The lightsaber at his side felt like deadweight. _This is your life._

Part of him wanted to hold it again just to reassure himself, but…

But now he was on this side of the room there were other things grabbing his attention that he hadn’t seen from the entrance. Lying in the far corner was an open metal box next to a loose chain and a… Anakin didn’t even know what to call it: a small metal cuboid with a half-ring of metal sticking out of one end and a shaped-metal key sticking out of the other. A primitive lock of some kind, he guessed.

In the adjacent corner, there was a mess of smashed tile, circling a black patch that on closer inspection proved to be a hole in the floor. Anakin crept closer to investigate, kneeling by the edge and shining his light down into it.

Amongst many pipes and cables, something glinted up at him from the darkness. It looked like some kind of pendant on a small silver chain that was caught on… what was that? He stretched the light as far as he could, face pressed right against the floor. If Obi-Wan had been there he’d have told him he was going to get the wound on his forehead infected, but in order to get to Obi-Wan Anakin was going to have to find him before the Sith Master did.

Fan blade. There was part of a cooling system down there, and the chain was caught on one of the blades. By now Anakin was willing to bet the chain had a shaped-metal key on it.

_More old tech_ , he thought. _Last time I saw an actual fan-based cooling system, I was back on Tatooine._

There was no way his arm was going to be able to reach the key and the hole was too small to climb through – and too sturdy for him to enlarge with the wrench. He could have tried the rifle, of course, if he wanted to risk melting the key, but he wasn’t quite at his wits end yet.

No, in order to get that key he’d have to find the fan controls and get it working again. Once the blades started turning, the key would slip off and fall… it looked like the hole went straight down to the first floor. As long as the door to that room wasn’t locked, he’d get it.

And what had that small note from the office said? That they needed to fix the machine in the basement in order to get the key?

_I’m coming, Master. Hold on._

*~*~*~*~*

It did not escape Anakin’s thoughts, even as they focused in on Obi-Wan and getting back to him by any means necessary, that this whole set-up was…

Unnatural.

Why would there be a key on a fan blade through a hole just big enough for him to look through but not big enough for him to get down? Why, for example, had there been a key jammed into the hand or the throat of a burned corpse, or in a podium that only opened when five metal discs were placed inside in the correct order? Why had Vader thrown him off the roof but not killed him?

He felt like a rat running in someone else’s maze, and the strange thing was that he was somehow almost certain it wasn’t Vader responsible, even if he used it to his advantage. That, as Maul had said, there was something wrong with the _town_. ‘Fruits of the Sith Lords of old’ he’d described it, so whoever was responsible was probably long gone.

Yet he still felt like he was being tested.

_You can figure it out when you get back_ , he told himself. _You know you’re not going to get it on your own._

Anakin kept running.

The second stairwell was open, but the door to the second floor within it was locked, so he couldn’t try to get into the room that massive cooling fan was sitting in directly. To his immense relief the only other floor that was blocked off by the second stairwell was the fourth, and while he was sure with his luck he’d end up needing to go there for some reason, he didn’t need to go there now.

The basement air was stale and musty compared with the rest of the Med Centre, but down here there was actually still some limited lighting in effect, giving Anakin the opportunity to really admire the black, oily substance seeping down the rusty walls and the piles of rubbish heaped at the end of the small corridor – including a heap of blood-stained dressings.

Gross, but also a sign that this centre had been in use at least within the last few years – or they would have disintegrated by now.

There were six rooms on this level: two that were neither marked on the map nor had any sign on them, ‘Mainframe Access’ – locked, of course – ‘Staff Misbehaviour Room’, which Anakin really didn’t want to look into, ‘Altar Room’ – again, one to steer clear of if he had a choice in the matter, and the ‘Generator’ room.

However, when he opened the door to the last one, the only one he had any interest in right now, something felt off. It wasn’t the Force – if he’d had that he could have just used it to pull the key towards himself upstairs.

It was something about the room – a creepy kind of feeling, like he’d been there before – in a dream, perhaps. A loud humming noise and sickly yellow light stabbed their way into his head. Anakin tried not to wince at the onslaught.

There were six ancient machines powering the Med Centre. Or, not powering the Med Centre, as the case proved to be, though it did look like four out of the six were still functioning in a limited capacity. A brief examination of the system that was closet to him when he went in and he could more or less determine the way the power was distributed throughout the building.

In fact, it all seemed to come to him a little _too_ easily. Had he worked on a machine like this before?

The answer didn’t come back to him until he traced the supply to that cooling system to one of the four that were semi-functional. When he unscrewed the panel to the main access point and lifted it off, there was a sudden blur of movement.

An amber-eyed, furry creature like the one he’d seen Luke trying to feed earlier leapt out of the machinery and raced across the room, disappearing into the pipes.

Anakin swore and recoiled, craning his neck around to watch it go and then backing up from the generator in case it had any friends who had decided to fight instead of flee. None appeared.

He called after the creature: “Sorry to disturb your evening!” before poking his head fully into the machine, even then thinking,

_That was just like the time that womprat built a nest inside…_

A chorus of tiny, mewling whimpers reached his ear then. He shined his light towards –

Babies. Whatever that thing was, it had a bunch of younglings living in its nest in the nice, warm generator. Not too warm, because the generator had its own cooling system to prevent overheating. There were two, four… eight of them, at a count.

With a heavy sigh, Anakin pulled the babies out one by one with his mechanical hand, the palm of which they fit nicely in. They didn’t try to bite him though, just lay there, whining for their mother to come back.

_If this species is anything like womprats, she won’t_ , he thought glumly. _These younglings will be dead in a day now._

Well, at least he didn’t have to break their necks himself like he had with the baby rats. Though that might have been the kinder fate in the end.

That was when he realised:

_Unbelievable. This is the exact same make as that generator from The Palace. Why would anyone outside of Tatooine be using one of those?_

It leant credence, he supposed, to the idea that others had come here since the fall of the Sith empire and used this town as a stopping-off ground: perhaps it was only inhabited seasonally and used for seedy operations the locals were bribed to keep quiet about, but nobody actually lived here because it was a kriffing Sith hotspot and full of weird monsters. Then he might have expected to find the same tech used here as he had in a seedy operation on a Hutt-controlled planet fifteen, sixteen years ago?

He’d been eight the last time he’d seen one of these. It was strange though, because he’d been thinking of The Palace only a few hours ago – that heavy durasteel door the thing he hadn’t known at the time was the Force had warned him not to go through.

And Madame Ringa’s story about the Croaking Man.

As Obi-Wan had said in regards to those videos – there was no use dwelling on it now. Ringa had been fed to a rancor by old Jabba for skimming from his tribute money, and good riddance to her. Right now, he needed to be worried about Obi-Wan.

Anakin took as much of the creatures’ nest out of the machinery as he could and put them all in the far corner, far enough away that the humming of the machinery drowned out their cries.

_A Jedi shows compassion towards all lives_ , he heard Obi-Wan telling him, as he walked away.

_But some lives are more important than others_ , Anakin thought.

_“He’s too dangerous to leave alive.”_

_Focus._

Fortunately, there was a cupboard with some equipment for basic repairs, and a lock weak enough to be smashed with the wrench. Anakin was able to discern quite quickly the best way to get power back to the cooling system on the second floor, and set to work as fast as he could.

Because the fan only needed to start turning for a moment for the key to drop, Anakin could get away with a ten or fifteen standard minute job with the wiring that had been chewed through by the furballs. When he had fixed a similar problem in the same machine at The Palace, it had taken over an hour. Of course, he had been eight at the time. And that generator had had all that sand in its convertor... just a mess.

Come to think of it though, that one had been rigged up for solar power. He very much doubted there was enough solar energy getting through the fog in Silent Hill to power his flashlight, let alone a building of this size, so he wondered where the power was sourced from in this model. It looked like it was coming from underground with this set-up. Fossil fuel deposits? Not the most efficient fuel source, but effective enough, he supposed.

_There_ , he thought, wrapping a final bit of electrical tape around a wire. _Now to see if I still have the repair skills of an eight-year-old._

Judging by the way the machine began to whir when he pressed the restart button, he just might have. There was a series of increasingly nerve-wracking creaks, groans and loud clunking noises in the walls around and above him over the next minute or so, but after a tense wait the cacophony died down to a rattle, and the generator was working.

Anakin couldn’t see or hear the fan turn from here, but he had to have some faith it would.

“Right,” he said to himself. “Hold on, Obi-Wan.”

He glanced over to where he’d left the nest before he went back, but he didn’t go over to check on the babies. It would have been a stupid, sentimental thing to do.

Anakin slipped out of the door and began running back up the stairwell to the first floor, bringing up the floorplan on his communicator as he went. It was more difficult than it should have been to overlay third, on second on first floors in his mind and comprehend that Droid Storage was above a room with a crossed-out name, which was above the cafeteria. His head didn’t hurt anymore, but it was…

It was getting difficult to focus. Rex would have told him to eat, he was sure. Had he remembered to bring any ration bars with him?

Getting back into the corridor he found himself snorting with laughter. _Maybe I’ll find something in the cafeteria I could –_

The static on his communicator began to crackle again.

“Fuck,” he muttered.

A splash of neon turquoise and yellow heading his way was soon followed by a second painted suit in luminous orange, and a third in blue and lilac. Anakin raised the rifle he’d taken off the droideka and fired one shot after another into each.

“I have no fucking time for you!” he snapped.

The rifle had a powerful kick to it, jerking his arm at the join between metal and flesh painfully. But that part of him was already in pain, so it made little difference to Anakin. What did make a difference was seeing one of these painted suits go down after only three shots.

Not one was able to last longer than three, and after firing the rifle nine times he was off again, a little more relieved and hopeful about his situation.

_One day it’s all going to be a bad memory you and Obi-Wan scare the younglings with_ , he told himself.

However, he had made it to the first-floor cafeteria, and luck was on his side in this case: the double doors slid open.

Inside was a huge grey space stacked with long grey tables and benches – dimly lit by emergency lighting from the same generator Anakin had just managed to get working. He recognised the room from the photo Obi-Wan had found in the Sexual Health Clinic, but before he could look for keys, a sharp movement grabbed his attention.

The one figure who was in the room with him turned around with a start.

Anakin blinked in disbelief.

“Luke?”

*~*~*~*~*

The young man lowered his blaster with a relieved sigh. “Anakin – you’re okay, thank goodness!”

For a moment Anakin was too shocked to speak. Concern for Obi-Wan had been at the forefront of his mind since he’d had to lie down, but concern for Luke had never entirely left him since he’d first laid eyes on him.

Now it seemed he needn’t have worried – apart from a smudge of what was probably engine grease on his cheek, Luke looked like he was in perfect condition. He’d shed his orange flightsuit and was clad in dove grey, no rips, no bloodstains, no bruises… not a scratch on him.

_Fuck. With all those painted suits of armour flying around out there, not to mention Vader, he’s got to be the luckiest kid in the galaxy,_ Anakin thought.

“Force…” he breathed. “Kid, I can’t believe it. Why the hell did you run off like that – you could have been killed?!”

Luke rubbed the back of his head, grimacing. “Sorry, I thought I saw someone I knew.”

Anakin groaned, remembering. “Your father’s Jedi friend? Didn’t you say Vader killed him?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, he did, but… well… it’s hard to explain.”

Anakin let that one go because he felt he might be able to understand. If he had thought he’d seen his mother out there, for instance… but he still wasn’t done.

“And you came in here? You do know Vader is creeping around the place, don’t you? I was lucky to escape him with my life.” A little misleading, but… “And you said you knew Vader, why in all the galaxy would you be hanging around with Maul? I warned you he was a Sith Lord too.”

Luke frowned a little. “You mean, because he uses the Dark Side of the Force?”

“More or less,” said Anakin, waving his hand dismissively. “The point is this place is dangerous – too dangerous for someone who only has a small bit of Jedi training under their belt. Heck, Masters on the Jedi Council could lose their lives here – you _need_ to get back to my transport and wait for me.”

Whereas before Luke had seemed as though he’d listen to reason, now he was looking at Anakin with an air of a waiter listening to a rant from a hysterical customer. Not that Anakin hadn’t already thought Luke might just have been humouring him before, it was just frustrating – especially when he replied,

“Well, you’re the one who’s all banged up.”

“Like I said before,” Anakin exclaimed, “the Sith is focused on me because I’m a Jedi,” the ‘Chosen One’, rather, but there was no need for Luke to have to listen to that crap. “But if he starts thinking we’re friends he’ll be jumping at the bit to try and use you against me – that’s what Sith do.”

To his annoyance, Luke smirked – or gave him an approximation of a smirk, anyway. “Does that mean we can’t be friends?”

_Cheeky._ “It means you’ll be dead, you little squirt.” He cuffed the kid’s head lightly. 

Luke smiled a little sheepishly, and Anakin felt he was beginning to understand what Anakin was getting at, but at the same time he doubted that Luke was convinced. He took a deep breath.

“Do you have the key to the Research Station still?” he asked.

His heart sank back into the basement when he saw the confused expression on Luke’s face.

“Key?” he repeated.

At once, Anakin knew Maul had tricked him – told him to go after Luke when Maul had obviously been the one to take the key himself. It went without saying that Anakin was a brainless dolt, really, but without the Force his ability to read people’s intentions was shot.

_You shouldn’t have needed the Force though, should you? I mean, why would kriffing Darth Maul be trying to help you out? Twit._

He exhaled slowly. “You don’t have the key. Of course you don’t.”

“Well, I admit I’ve picked up a bunch of keys since I got here, but not for the Research Station,” said Luke. “That was the first place I tried looking for my father, but you can’t get in without a retinal scan.”

_Retinal scan? What were you going to get from the dealer at the bowling alley then, a counterfeit eyeball?_

Anakin groaned aloud. Fooling that kind of scanner was going to be a bitch.

“Sorry,” said Luke.

“No, that’s not your fault.” Anakin took another deep breath. “All right, well, while we’re unable to get back to the transport you’d better stick with me. Did you not run in to any of those… the suits of armour?”

For a long moment Luke stared at him in a way that made Anakin feel really nervous – like he had been talking nonsense and Luke was about to tell him he was clearly insane. But instead, Luke answered,

“Oh, you mean the weird, Storm Trooper things. Yeah, I’ve seen them around this place, but my blaster seems to work well enough on them. Haven’t run into Vader here, at least not yet.”

“Yeah, well, he threw me off the roof.”

Luke’s eyes widened. “Are you okay!?”

_Of course I’m not okay_ , Anakin wanted to snap, but because Luke looked so sincere in his concern he couldn’t bring himself to. “I’m fine,” he said, shaking his head. After a pause, he took a look around the dingy canteen. Then he looked up to the ceiling,

To his immense relief the hole going up to the second floor was easy to spot. He could hear the hum from the fan blades above them, and on the edge of the hole the silver chain was dangling, caught on a loose wire. He jumped up onto one of the tables and stretched, but he needed the wrench to pull the chain down.

“What is that?” asked Luke.

“Hopefully, a way out of here,” Anakin told him, hooking the top jaw of the wrench around the chain and yanking it down. Then chain came easily enough, and he caught it in his left hand.

But it wasn’t a shaped-metal key that had been attached. Instead, he found himself holding what he at first assumed to be a charm, shaped something like a Republic cruiser, although not exactly so. Finely-worked, but with no apparent practical purpose.

Only… Anakin had a feeling about it. He peered closer under the light, and to his immense relief, he found a tiny button on the underside. It was a key after all, just slightly more high-tech than some of the ones he’d had to use earlier, thank the Force.

Luke hopped up beside him to look over his shoulder. “Hey, that’s like the one I found – “

Anakin felt something in the Force suddenly, powerfully, for the first time that day.

He grabbed Luke around the shoulders and threw them both off the table just as there was a gargantuan crack in the ceiling above them, and with a monstrous tearing noise and clinking of shards of rusted metal flying into hard surfaces the hole in the ceiling split wide open.

As fast as he could Anakin yanked Luke back up again and dragged him across the room. A moment later the giant fan on the floor above came heaving through the ceiling, landing on the tables below and crushing them with an ear-splitting crash as the still-spinning blades shrieked against the floor and flew off – and Anakin had to duck to avoid the one that propelled itself into the wall behind him and stuck fast.

A moment later, a blue and orange suit followed the giant machine, hanging from its wires like some malevolent child was dangling their toys into a dollhouse. A yellow and lilac one came after that, then a green one, splattered with a sickly red that almost made it look like it had been stabbed in several places through its armour.

Anakin and Luke started shooting at the suits right away, but then a fourth suit smeared with a few paltry streaks of turquoise began to descend and Anakin had a feeling discretion might be the better part of valour – at least while he had to look after a civilian.

“Back into the corridor!” he yelled over the static and clanking ceramic noises of the suits. “I’ll cover you!”

“Right!” Luke called back, sidling behind Anakin steadily before dropping his arms and rushing back to open the door while Anakin continued to fire.

With the rifle he was able to cause enough damage with each shot that he could hold four back at a time, but then a fifth, yellow, orange and blue suit came down – a little more jerkily than its companions, and Anakin had to avoid a blow from the green one to fire on the turquoise one as they were both getting too close.

“It’s open!” Luke shouted, firing a few shots into the green suit. Anakin caught a glimpse of a sixth suit beginning to descend from the hole as he ran for the door, and he slapped his hand over the door control button as soon as he and Luke were over the threshold.

The door closing behind them didn’t give them a chance to catch their breath – the static still screamed on Anakin’s communicator, and more suits were coming up the corridor behind them.

_Where the fuck are all of these things coming from?!_

“Let’s keep moving!” Luke suggested, and ran – straight for the double doors blocking the one section of the hospital off from the other. Anakin wanted to tell him to stop, that he didn’t know if the key he’d picked up would work on those doors and the suits glided fast enough that they’d corner them if they couldn’t get through, but he didn’t have the time, and he followed Luke as fast as he could.

At a sprint they were both of them a little faster than the suits, though Anakin’s right leg screamed from his second fall onto it of the day. When they approached the doors at the end of the corridor, however, Luke pulled out a chain of his own.

On a second pendant, Luke pressed a button and Anakin heard a corresponding click from the doors ahead. _Of course_ , he thought, _if Luke hadn’t found a key then how the hell would he have gotten into the cafeteria in the first place!?_

The large double doors slid apart, and the two of them made it out of the reach of the suits with moments to spare.

Anakin’s heart was thundering wildly and his bruises ached, but now he was back in the eastern part of the first floor he wasted no time heading back to the sexual health clinic.

“Come on,” he said over his shoulder, to a panting Luke. “One of my friends was injured, I left him in here, but that was before I knew Vader was about.”

He didn’t wait to make sure Luke was following, but he was relieved to hear his footsteps behind him.

The door to the clinic was intact and free from any lightsaber marks, which was a good sign, and Anakin fumbled for the key card before slapping it against the lock clumsily. However, as soon as he opened the door he knew something was wrong.

“Obi-Wan…?!”

Images of finding his master lying dead in the dingy little room, eyes staring up at him accusingly, flew through his mind, and his hand trembled when he pulled the internal door to the examination room open.

Obi-Wan was not lying there dead, but it was only a few steps up from that. Obi-Wan wasn’t there at all.

“Shit,” growled Anakin, staring at the empty room. “Shit, shit, shit. He’s not here!”

_He must have woken up while I was lying unconscious on the third floor and gone to look for me. He could be anywhere in the building!_

_That, or Vader…_

“Did you set up a rendezvous point?” asked Luke.

That would have been the smart thing to do. “No, no rendezvous point. He was hurt, like I said, and I wasn’t thinking straight.” Anakin groaned with frustration.

“What are these?” Luke asked him.

He was reaching for the pile of prints on the small trolley that Anakin had left there, face-down.

“Those are gross, don’t look at them,” Anakin snapped.

Luke held his hands up with a particularly innocent look.

But that was when Anakin noticed one of the prints had been removed from the pile and placed on the bed, along with the bloodstained bandage he was certain had been wrapped around Obi-Wan’s head. Anakin didn’t really want to look at the print, but couldn’t deny it had been placed there deliberately.

Steeling himself, he turned the paper over. Thankfully, there was a large section of the image with a huge black blot on it, and it was obscuring anything objectionable – though Anakin saw the end of an orange, twilek lekku poking out of the black. Obi-Wan had actually taken the time to censor the image for him using the filthy black gunk that was seeping out of the walls all over the building – in this place, and in this situation. That was just like him, and Anakin almost smiled.

The reason his master had picked this photo was also apparent: above the black blot was a sign on the wall in the photo, circled in black and saying:

**ACTIVITIES ROOM**

Anakin called up the floorplan again and found the Activities Room on the fourth floor. He decided not to think about why these images all seemed to be of people having sex inside this very med centre, though it did kind of make him wonder what sort of place they had been running here.

_Oh, yeah – a kriffing Sith mental hospital._

“All right,” Anakin muttered. “He was heading to the ‘Activities Room’. So that’s where we’ll go.” He looked back at Luke. “Sorry, I know I said I’d get you out of here, but I need to – “

“ – you need to make sure your friend’s okay,” Luke finished with him, his smile lighting up the room almost as much as the flashlight. “I understand what that’s like, believe me.”

“You have people waiting for you?”

Luke grinned. “A princess, a smuggler, a wookie and two droids.”

Anakin snorted. “You sound like you lead an interesting life, kid. Let’s see if we can’t get you back to it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's it, Anakin. Protect your baby boy - uh, this random Force-sensitive stranger, from looking at smutty pictures. Good Dad-ing. 
> 
> Well, I guess it's the last chapter of 2020 - and to sum up this year with a kernel of wisdom I want you all to remember: The real coronavirus was the friends we made along the way. ; )
> 
> Happy New Year, everyone!


	10. Progenitor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy 2021, everyone, and thanks in advance for reading, leaving kudos, commenting or any combination of the above! I love hearing your thoughts about the work and I hope you've all had a good week in the interim.
> 
> You may have noticed I've altered the summary for this story. A friend suggested to me that the original didn't read as enticing to non-Silent Hill fans, and particularly those who might never have heard of Silent Hill in the first place, as I don't made clear until you actually click on the fic that you don't need to know SH2 to enjoy it. We'll see how it pans out...
> 
> In this chapter, Luke and Anakin bond by discussing classical literature (and slavery), solving puzzles, shooting suits of armour and visiting sites of cultural significance. (to the Sith). Enjoy!
> 
> >>>>>>

Up on the fourth floor, the Activities Room was locked.

It was with great relief that Anakin discovered the key to opening it was the cruiser-pendant he’d almost killed himself and Luke getting out of the cooling system on the second floor. The lock beeped and turned green, and Luke pushed the door-release button. Although they hadn’t been attacked on this floor, they both hurried to get inside.

Inside the room a single light was flickering in a corner; the rest had burnt out. But even in the darkness Anakin could see the gigantic mess of paint in the same luminous, neon colours that adorned the suits that had been attacking them, emptied cans lying in vast puddles of the stuff all over the room.

Such was the mess that if it hadn’t been for the static on his communicator, Anakin wouldn’t have realised that there was, in fact, also a suit in the room.

It rose up from the floor like a drone, drenched in every colour of paint that was splattered over everywhere, and came at Anakin and Luke for about a split second before the first shot hit it.

Two blasts from Anakin’s rifle and three from Luke’s weapon and the thing cracked open, spilling more paint everywhere. It crumpled to the ground and the static died away. Anakin let out a sigh of relief.

But he wasn’t really relieved, because it went without saying that Obi-Wan wasn’t there.

Breathing heavily, Luke turned to him to ask – “I suppose now is as good a time as any to ask if you learned any more about what the hell is going on here?”

“Language,” said Anakin, to which Luke blushed sheepishly. “And no, I haven’t any idea.” Anakin began to search the room as he talked, treading through the paint with disgust. “From what I’ve been able to gather there were two Sith Lords at the helm of something… weird, going on here, but that was a long time ago.”

“Zeall and Phanti?” asked Luke, who must have come across similar clues. “How long ago do you think we’re talking about?”

“That’s what I’ve been having trouble figuring out. Some things point to their being around at the time of the last Sith Empire, others to one of them being Vader’s master.”

“I don’t think it’s that last one,” Luke said. “Ben was never able to tell me much about him, but he did say Vader had trained under _him_.”

Anakin whirled around. Did that mean Vader had been a _Jedi_ at some point?!

If that was the case there was who knew how much information about him available in the Temple archives. He needed to get back to them more than ever – and to bring Obi-Wan, because if there was something significant about Vader in the archives, Obi-Wan would find it.

Either way, _Luke_ wasn’t going to know the answer, so he managed to hold back from asking him. Instead, he turned his attention to the room.

It was a cramped space, considering it was meant to be an activities room for the whole hospital, but who was going to be surprised by that at this point? At any rate, from the mess of paint and paint brushes, and the six tall shelves of printed books spread around the room, it looked like the activities that had been on offer here had been ‘painting’ and ‘reading’. What a treat.

Well, Obi-Wan would probably have enjoyed the latter, at least. Anakin wondered idly what the Sith Lords were offering in this little library, and while Luke knelt by the painted suit, examining it further, Anakin pulled one of the books from the shelves and frowned at its contents.

An unfamiliar script. Strange, when most of the notes he’d found around here were in Basic, including those on official documents like those patient reports from downstairs. Anakin tried a second and then a third book, but each had been printed in the same completely foreign alphabet, and the third had some rather gory pictures of skinned body parts inside it.

Anakin hoped it was a medical textbook and the images were computer-generated to depict muscle formations, but somehow he doubted it.

“How do you think they move?” Luke asked him from across the room as he peered at the downed, hollow suit closely.

That was another mystery. Anakin put the book back on the shelf and went over to him.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I didn’t get a good look at them earlier. Though I did notice there was no circuitry inside.”

“There’s no nothing though,” said Luke. “And the wires aren’t hanging from anything, they just… hang. In mid-air. It just doesn’t make sense.”

It didn’t, and it made Anakin’s head hurt to think about it. A powerful Force-user could have moved them around, he supposed, but why would Vader bother doing a thing like that? In case Luke had any insights, he asked:

“You think Vader is playing a practical joke?”

“Oh, Vader’s not the joking type,” Luke confirmed for him, and though there was humour in his eyes, there was a dark tinge to that humour. “Not outside a few one-liners, or so I’ve heard.”

“Well, he had nothing to say to me,” said Anakin. “But if not the Force… I don’t know. Some kind of advanced magnetism, maybe?”

Luke nodded. He didn’t seem to be able to figure it out any better than Anakin though, and it seemed to Anakin that something was weighing heavily on the young man’s mind. He stared down at the broken suit with a troubled, almost sad expression.

“… have you ever met a real-life trooper before?” Anakin asked him.

“I don’t know if I’d say ‘met’,” said Luke. “I just… well. I guess looking at all this… blood gets me thinking about the war and that cost of it.”

‘Blood’ was an odd way of describing the garish paint, but he could see what Luke was getting at: it did flow out of the suits when they were ‘injured’. More importantly, he hadn’t thought before that Luke had had anything to do with the war, and though he was intrigued he also felt they were better off not discussing politics, in case those politics differed.

Anakin knew he could get… emotional, when it came to Separatists, and he really wanted to keep liking Luke.

“It’s definitely a big cost,” he told him. “I don’t forget the men under my command who’ve fallen in battle. But there’s a greater cost to allowing people to do evil things to the galaxy unchecked, and a Jedi has to do whatever it takes to stop that from happening.”

Luke met his eyes as he spoke, and when he was done looked away, nodding to himself. But he replied –

“I know. I know I should be objective about it too, but I don’t like the thought of taking lives, and I don’t like taking lives, and looking back and realising I celebrated it at the time.”

Anakin frowned. Though he was impressed that Luke sounded more like a Jedi than he himself often did, he couldn’t believe…

“How many lives have _you_ taken?” he asked, semi-humorously.

Those innocent-looking eyes met his again, now looking deadly serious as well.

“More than you’d think, probably.”

_More than I’d… but surely_ this kid _can’t be some kind of crazed mass-murderer? He probably just blames himself for a lot of deaths that weren’t actually his fault, for whatever reason. He wouldn’t be the first person I’ve met to do so._

“I mean, I don’t regret what I’ve done,” Luke told him, “but I am sorry it had to turn out the way it did. I don’t know if the others would understand how I feel about it though.”

Although it may have been the opposite for Anakin – not feeling sorry rather than feeling it – he knew that last feeling. Since it was one that had plagued him for years though, he also knew he didn’t have a good answer for Luke and turned around so he could put his left hand on Luke’s shoulder instead of the cybernetic one.

“When we leave this place I’m going to take you to some people who can help you out with that one,” he told him. “Because I know they’d love to talk it through with you.”

“You mean other Jedi!?” asked Luke excitedly.

Anakin laughed. “I mean other, wiser Jedi. Come on, I’m going to search the room to see if my friend left anymore clues.”

“Right.” Luke followed him as he stood up, then asked, “I heard you call your friend ‘Obi-Wan’ back there – I feel like I’ve heard the name before, but I can’t remember where…”

That got another laugh out of Anakin. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you had, kid. My master gets around.”

He paused. _Hope he didn’t misunderstand what I meant there…_

“I’m going to look through the rest of these books,” he said. “I know it sounds like a waste of time, and it might be that as well, but the Obi-Wan I know sure loves his books.”

“Are they all old paper books?” Luke asked.

“Looks that way,” said Anakin, scanning the room. “No, wait – there’s a stack of holo-books on that shelf. You read well?” Being that the kid was from Tatooine, he probably shouldn’t just assume that he could.

“Pretty well,” said Luke. “These look kind of old too, but I think I can make them work with my device.”

“Got to love backwards compatibility,” said Anakin. “Let me know if you find anything interesting.”

For the next few minutes the two of them searched in silence – Luke sticking novel after novel through his own reading device and skimming through their content, while Anakin pulled one book after another off the shelves and rifled through their pages. Book after book had been printed in the same unfamiliar characters, and Luke let him know within about a minute that most of the data on the novels he was trying to look at was corrupted.

But after moving through nearly an entire bookshelf of indecipherable books Anakin did find one, thrown onto the top of the shelf, that had some Basic in it. It turned out to be only the dedication, the rest was in the unfamiliar language, but it was something, at least.

_To Olor_ _é_

_I congratulate you on your achievement._

_Now you have received your title, do you think anything will change?_

_Here’s to a more hopeful future, my friend._

_Yours, Caden_

The handwriting was neat and almost fancy, like the writer had been trained in calligraphy but was still an amateur. The rest of the book was opaque in all but the layout of the text, which suggested verse to Anakin, rather than prose. The inscription wasn’t in the least helpful, as far as Anakin could see, but he set it aside anyway as the only book with anything that was at all legible to him so far.

When he set one of the overturned tables back on its legs and put the book on the half of the top that wasn’t smeared with paint, Luke looked up at him from the shelf of holo-novels and announced –

“I found one that’s mostly intact, but I think it’s just a kid’s book.”

Anakin walked over, in case he could discern some clue from the book that Luke couldn’t. To his surprise he found the text projected in the air not only in Basic, but familiar to him.

“I don’t believe it,” he laughed, even as an uncomfortable, hollow feeling started to grow in his chest. “ ‘ _The Winds of Freedom’_. I caught Ahsoka reading this one when we were stuck in a library on the capital city of Darda. Used to be a bank; had the only working forcefield in the district when it seemed like every battle droid in the system was crawling through the streets. Anyway, Fives woke me up to take watch and she must have lost track of time.”

_“One of Obi-Wan’s bodice-rippers, Snips?”_

“… jumped out of her skin when I came up there. Poor Ahsoka – she looked so embarrassed.” He chuckled.

“Ahsoka… she’s your student?” Luke asked.

“She was,” said Anakin. Then, to make sure he didn’t depress Luke by making him think she was dead or something, “but she decided the Jedi life was not for her.”

“And ‘ _The Winds of Freedom’_ … it’s what – a teen romance?”

“Kind of,” said Anakin. “I gave it a once-over to see what she had looked so caught up by, and there was a romance element to it. I hadn’t heard of it before, but it’s this two hundred and something-year-old teen classic about this slave rebellion on an outer rim world, as written by someone who’s never been to the outer rim.”

Darda had been their first mission after Kadavo, and Ahsoka had been hovering around him for a while.

“Oh,” said Luke, as one who knew the conceptions people closer to the centre had about life past the mid-rim.

“Yeah, it got a lot of attention back in the day for putting a spotlight on modern slavery. Which is a good thing, I guess – one of the forerunners of a big push against the trade. Would have been nice if they’d pushed a little further, but there you go.”

He hoped he hadn’t sounded too bitter there. It wasn’t like Luke was responsible.

“Was the book pretty bad, then?”

Anakin held his hand up, tilting it from side to side. “I’m not a connoisseur of that kind of book,” he said dryly. Then he sighed. “I mean, it’s obvious it was written by someone who thought slavery was terrible and wanted to do something about it… and that’s a good thing – trust me, I’d be the first person to say that. I just didn’t find it very… relatable.”

_And from Luke’s point of view, why should you have? He doesn’t know your past, you moron._

But Luke didn’t seem at all confused, and only asked, “Too soft? Not that I have first-hand experience; my uncle would never have owned slaves, but I’ve heard things. I guess maybe since it’s a kid’s book – “

“It’s not that,” Anakin interrupted. “At least, not exactly. Actually, it got very brutal in places. Too brutal, really. That probably sounds strange, but… well.”

He didn’t know why he was saying this to Luke now, when he’d never said it to anyone before.

Yet for some reason, he just kept talking.

“It’s not like all the horrors the author described never happened, I’m sure they did even if I personally never witnessed all of them: mass beatings, killings,” _rapes_ , he didn’t want to say in front of someone as innocent-looking as Luke, and to be sure there was nothing so explicit in this book for teenagers, yet the author had alluded to it, “ – some things that were worse than what was described in the book. But in ‘ _Winds_ ’ this stuff is day in, day out, every day the slaves are getting whipped in the town square for dropping cups and spilling tea.”

He laughed.

“I don’t know how they actually got any work done in those conditions. There was this one subplot, where this poor artist living on the outskirts of town, falls in love with the beautiful twilek slave minstrel and starts saving up to buy her freedom. Every time he goes to her master with the funds, the master raises the price. When he’s finally got together three times as much as he’d originally been quoted for he goes to buy her freedom, only to find the master’s sold her to a mining corporation.”

Mines were notoriously some of the worst places a slave could end up, and that was probably why the author had gone in that direction.

But.

“What kind of mining operation forks out three times what a singing slave is worth when she’ll only be half as strong as what they can buy from prison colonies for a fifth of the price? And if they bought her for a reduced price, why would the master have agreed to sell her to them when there was a guy offering five times as much? For the sake of being _evil_?”

Anakin hadn’t really had anyone he could laugh about the absurdities in that book to before. It was too much linked in to his past for him to be comfortable bringing it up around the people he knew, and he wasn’t going to risk engaging online about this particular topic with random strangers, lest another device end up unceremoniously Force-crushed and thrown in the trash.

Granted, there was no real reason to believe he ‘had’ someone now – except that Luke was from Tatooine too, he guessed.

“It was like this planet had been colonised by a cabal of sadists who had already made it big on the stock market and didn’t have to worry about profit or anything, they just beat up their slaves for fun all day long. And there was this kid – “

He paused to laugh again.

“ – this little, five-year-old slave kid who, of course, could out-talk any slaver and was pretty much there to give pep talks to the main character when she was feeling down and say inspiring crap at opportune moments, then take half a chapter to die of an easily-treated illness after giving her rations away to a group of starving natives in order to bring peace between them and the rebel slaves.”

Luke was sitting there, perfectly patient, waiting.

So Anakin just continued, though he went back to the second bookshelf and started going through the books again.

“When _I_ was five, I remember telling my _own mother_ I hated her because she couldn’t get me this stupid toy I wanted – with the tiny ships that you put little input codes into to make them fly certain manoeuvres? Told her she’d ‘ruined my life’ – little shit…”

Another indecipherable book went back on the shelf. It still perturbed him to this day, sometimes, that his mother had only ever seen good in him when he could remember doing so many bad things…

“And _she_ actually apologised to me, while I was sitting there, howling my head off like a little sand-wolf. I swear, if I had the power to go back in time, I would wring that little brat’s neck for screaming at my mother like that.”

“That’s a bit harsh,” Luke said with a nervous laugh. “You were just a kid.”

Anakin glanced at him briefly, then back to the shelf. “Yeah, I guess. The point is, that author didn’t get it. I mean, yes, slaves are beaten, kidnapped, murdered, occasionally worked to death if you do end up in a mine or something.” He sighed. “But not every day.”

“Some days were just normal,” Luke offered, as he loaded another novel.

“Most days,” said Anakin. “And _that_ was the thing. When someone got hurt or died, or you had to do something that…”

_“Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to hold on to your hand really well, and you hold on to your tools, and then I’m going to put my other hand over your eyes until we reach the door to the generator – but I promise you, I won’t let you fall.”_

“… something that you really shouldn’t have had to do, there was a part of you that…” He sighed. “How should I put this? It reminded you that you were supposed to be treated better. As opposed to the days you got up, ate something, went to work, worked, went home, ate and went to bed – that’s what most of the free galaxy does, isn’t it? Makes you feel like you live a normal life. That was the real bad part.”

To his surprise, the next book he pulled out of the shelf had another inscription in Basic on the title page. He pulled his mind away from the past and into the present to read what was said.

_My poor, dear Olor_ _é_

_I fear you go where I cannot follow – into an abyss more dreadful than I could dare to dwell._

_From the depths of my dark place into yours, these are the words I send you._

_I pray you hear them,_

_Caden_

Anakin recoiled slightly, suddenly feeling like someone was standing behind him in the darkness, watching him.

He was relieved when Luke spoke.

“Thelzan.”

“Hmm?”

Luke looked slightly surprised, as though he hadn’t realised that he had spoken aloud. He explained –

“Oh… Thelzan. He was a herding slave on a neighbouring farm – his master paid my uncle for the herd to be allowed to drink from one of our water stores when they were driven near our lands. His family had been owned by that farm for generations; poor guy absolutely adored his master and master’s family.”

Grimacing, Anakin put the second inscribed book on the table.

“Maybe. Probably he did and he didn’t at the same time.”

Luke’s expression became pensive. “My uncle didn’t like doing business with Thelzan’s master. If he did, he’d always be making sure the guy knew exactly where he stood on the subject. But he could hardly have had nothing to do with him. Out in the desert, as remote as we were, the farmers have to look out for one another.”

Of course. Among other things, there were Tusken Raiders out in that desert, after all. That was another thing the dumb ‘ _Winds of Freedom’_ book did that irked him – when they had the slaves join forces with the peaceful, mistreated, indigenous people of the planet to overthrow the masters.

The slaves of Mos Espa? They’d sooner have teamed up with the Zygerrians than those… things.

_Sentient beings, Anakin,_ Obi-Wan would have chided him.

He never questioned that descriptor in regards to the Tuskens out loud, because he didn’t want to hear Obi-Wan confirm they were – or were from his point of view, anyway. But at least there were slaves who could say they personally had never suffered because of a Zygerrian. It was hard to find someone who didn’t know at least one person who’d been attacked by the Sand People out in the desert on Tatooine.

… _slaughter them like_ animals –

Would Luke understand _that_ too, he wondered.

“Well, that’s the last of these files,” Luke said after a long pause. “Some of them had a few pages I could read, but nothing that seemed to jump out as why your friend might have thought you should go here.” He stood up. “Need any help?”

“Read anything other than Basic?” Anakin asked.

Luke rubbed the back of his head sheepishly. “Uh, afraid not,” he said. “I mean, I know Huttese and a few pieces of other languages here and there, but not other kinds of writing.”

“Well. The only Basic I’ve found so far has been in these two, but only in an inscription in the front.”

“An… inscription?”

Safe to say Luke was not familiar with the conventions of printed books. Anakin himself only knew because of that exhibition he’d been to.

“Take a look at the very first page,” he told him.

Luke did so, and frowned at the second of the two notes Anakin had found.

“Sounds kind of ominous. Do you recognise the names?”

“Oloré and Caden? Nope. You?”

“Mm-mm.” Luke shook his head. “I’ll start at the other end and see if I can find any more like them though.”

“Well, I don’t know if they’ll be any use, but at the moment it’s the only thing that’s leaping out at me.”

There followed a short, silent minute or two where the two of them went through book after book on the remaining four shelves. All the print was in the same language, some with images, most without, and those that did contain images were generally of the sort Anakin wished he hadn’t seen once he’d looked at them. A few were even explicit.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be looking at these,” he said to Luke, after slamming one such piece of crap shut. “Just check the title page to see if there are any other inscriptions like the one I showed you.”

“Okay,” said Luke, but there was a little bit of a giggle in his voice, and out of the corner of his eye Anakin could see he was still flipping through all the pages of the books he was checking.

The next book to have an inscription, on the last shelf, was one Luke found – and it was a little different to the first two.

_Dear _______

The name had been scribbled out, and the handwriting was much less sophisticated. This book was also thinner than the others, with larger inside print.

_I am sorry about ______ I hope you will be okay and I made Felis make this book for you but my papa said your father would only give it to you if it was in the proper language so I hope you like it._

_One day I think we will be very strong and then we will be happy and then maybe ______ will come back._

_From ________

At the side of the inscription was a childish drawing of three figures, standing next to what looked like a bacta tank.

There was a boy with dark hair labelled ‘ME’, a girl in black that had been coloured on so vigorously with the pen that there was a small hole in the paper where the nib had ripped through, pale-haired and labelled ‘YOU’, and a kind of scribbly figure, with narrow boxes drawn all over them, the same height as the other two. Their label had been scribbled out.

“Are those supposed to be bandages?” asked Luke.

That might have been the case. Maybe the scribbles on the third figure, between the boxes, were meant to be their wounds? Either way it left Anakin feeling disturbed, but the handwriting looked like it might plausibly have belonged to ‘Caden’ at an earlier stage and he added it to the pile. And there was something else.

“ ‘Felis’,” Anakin mused aloud. “I’ve come across that name before, in the apartment block. I wonder if it’s the same guy.”

He didn’t see what it might matter if he was, from the sound of that diary Felis had been a slave of Darth Zeall so he supposed it wasn’t significant that his name should appear…

_‘Your father will only give it to you…_ ’ Anakin re-read.

‘Your _father_ will only…’

He wondered if…

“In one of the diaries I read, it sounded like Zeall had a daughter.” He looked back at the figure in black drawn by the child. “That could be Oloré, I guess.”

He didn’t know that it mattered, since _she_ couldn’t possibly be Vader.

Anakin found the next book from Caden to Oloré on the bottom shelf of the third bookcase and brought it over to Luke so they could read it together. This time the page the inscription had been written on had been torn out, crumpled, then taped back in again at a later date. It read:

_My dear, good special friend._

_Here’s a present for you when you get out again. I know, it’s the best present you ever got!_

_Well, we all had a weird day of it – especially her ladyship – but I think we all learned a valuable lesson, and in the end, isn’t that what really matters?_

_I know you think so too._

_Lots of love,_

_Your bestest ever friend in the whole galaxy_

_(now that your real best friend is dead!)_

_P.S. I’ll let you know if I find Joss’ missing head! Guess Miriam will get that apartment after all…_

For a moment the two of them were quiet.

“O… kay,” said Luke slowly.

Anakin grimaced. _Guess I know what happened to the woman who wrote that diary in Q3 B2._

“The handwriting is better, but not as good as the first two I found. It’s the same guy, but I think he gave her this one when he was a teenager. It would account for the immature sense of humour, among other things.”

“I wonder why they all ended up here, in the library of a med centre?” Luke asked.

Anakin had no answer. But in a flash he realised something about the more childish note from before. Caden had said that Felis had ‘made’ the book – and indeed, he wouldn’t have expected to find an actual press and book-binding equipment outside a specialist museum. Nor had these been bound by hand.

The covers of the book were marbled, black on different colours, but they all felt the same to the touch of his left hand, as did the paper inside them.

“These books must have all been manufactured in the same place,” he announced. “Look at the covers – can you see any more like them?”

Luke’s eyes widened in understanding and he and Anakin scanned the last two cases without taking any of the books off the shelves. Within seconds, both had pulled a book each out.

And both of them were right. On the title page of the one Anakin had found:

_Oloré, my foolish friend,_

_By the time you read this I am sure I will be dead, and at your hand._

_(No hard feelings.)_

_Yes, I did help the girl. I have my reasons, but you know this already. It’s what I’ve said the whole time, after all. The code is the code, but my passions are my own – and you and I have never been ‘free’. Why suffer to pretend otherwise?_

_Oloré, I am afraid ‘they’ have driven you quite mad. And I say there are no hard feelings, because I did nothing to stop it. You will doubt, perhaps, that this would actually be concerning to me. I know I would doubt it, if anyone other than myself were saying it._

_But it is true. If I can say nothing else, I can still say I have only ever told you the truth._

_Oloré, I am sorry._

_Ever your brother,_

_Caden_

_(________)_

The name in brackets was scribbled out once again to the point of tearing the paper. The note in the book Luke found said:

_For Oloré_

_Because sometimes it’s just nice to give a friend a present._

_Can’t wait to see what you do next, my dear._

_Yours ever,_

_Caden_

Anakin read the last note right after the penultimate, but the latter was the one his mind lingered on.

Caden’s talk of ‘the code’ followed by the words ‘passion’ and ‘free’, combined with the general tone of all the notes confirmed for him that the giver and recipient of these poetry books were both Sith. That note – Caden’s last note, apparently – scratched at something dark inside of Anakin, almost so that it hurt to read it, and that made him start to feel angry again.

_You didn’t like being a Sith, then? Well boo-hoo. Force knows how many people you both made_ _suffer over the years. How much you have to do with the suffering going on right now._

_Force, please let Obi-Wan be all right._

“I think I found something,” Luke told him, and Anakin did what he could to release that sudden, strange anger into a Force that was still invisible to him.

Luke had picked up the first book Anakin had set aside and put it next to the last one. Anakin’s eyes were tired of nothing but the harsh flashlight in the darkness and the luminous paint on the floor, but he pushed through the stinging sensation and focused – and he saw what Luke meant.

The base colours of the two books were different; navy blue and grey, but when stood next to each other, front cover to back, the thickest of the black marbled streaks actually lined up with each other along the spines.

“I see,” said Anakin. “The lilac-y one, that’s the oldest – the one he gave her when they were little kids by the look of it. Put that up along the end there.”

After doing so, Luke picked up the fourth one they’d found, which had red as the base colour of its cover.

“Teenage Caden next?”

“Yep.”

Again, the black parts lined up – and once Luke put the blue and the grey one beside those two he could see clearly that there was a reason for the covers being the way they were.

Highly stylised, in what could hardly be called a line, the black marks along the spine when joined together took the shape of numbers. When Anakin added the second book he’d found a note in, the one that spoke of Caden’s ‘dark place’, and then put the book with the last note inside on the end, the numbers that were hidden in the pattern on the spines read:

**3025**

There was a short silence.

“Well,” said Luke. “That’s something.”

“Ugh,” said Anakin. “Obi-Wan is so much better at understanding this stuff. Why couldn’t he be the one solving these puzzles and me be the one with my head bashed in?” He rubbed his forehead tiredly.

“Hey, I think we’re doing okay,” said Luke. “Do you need a break?”

“No, I don’t need a break,” Anakin sighed. “I need to find Obi-Wan before Vader does. I just can’t see how this string of numbers is going to help – and he should know I wouldn’t be able to, he’s known me for more than… a minute.”

Luke chuckled. “Maybe it means ‘floor three, room twenty-five’?”

Anakin brought up the floorplan again and had a look at the third floor. The smaller rooms, patient rooms probably, did have numbers on them, though some were obscured by blackness. But wouldn’t you know – they only went up to twenty-four. Every other room was labelled, like the ‘Droid Centre’ Anakin had visited before.

“Guess not,” said Luke, a little dejected. “Maybe we should just go back to reception and wait?”

Anakin shook his head. “I can’t be sitting around doing nothing,” he said. He stared at the map for a while, frowning. “There are a lot of rooms I haven’t been able to search. I don’t know if we have time to go room by room, though most of these will be locked anyway.”

“I have a key I haven’t used yet,” Luke offered. “For one of the rooms in the basement.”

“The mainframe?”

“I wish. Says it’s for a chapel.”

_Sith Chapel. Sounds like a barrel of laughs._

Also, ‘Chapel’ rather than ‘temple’, seemed odd to Anakin, but it wasn’t the first time since he’d been here that something like this had come up. The diary from the apartment had talked about extra prayers at ‘mass’. That and ‘chapel’ were words he recognised, but to his knowledge they came from a more exotic religious tradition.

So it was odd to see them used for stuff related to the Sith. Although what did he know about ancient Sith religious traditions, and more importantly, why should he care? The cultural practices of a group of psychopathic butchers might have interested some people, but Anakin preferred to work on engines, if it was all the same.

“I was down in the basement earlier,” he said, “but I didn’t go into any room but the generator.”

“Did you get the generator to work?” Luke asked.

“I got it to drop a cooling system on your head,” said Anakin, and Luke gave him an amused yet unimpressed look. “If you’d rather start bottom-up the quickest way would be to go through the second stairwell – unless that pendant you have only works to open up the west section on the first floor?”

“This?”

Luke pulled out the silver pendant on chain he’d used to get them out of the reach of the suits on the first floor: a sphere, with a line around its circumference and a circular button on one hemisphere.

It was strange, but when Luke pulled it out and it clinked a little on its small chain, the noises seemed to echo around a much quieter room, much louder than they should have done. Anakin’s eyes were drawn to it for some reason.

“I know. It looks kind of like the Death Star, doesn’t it?” Luke pointed out, ruefully.

Anakin didn’t know what the ‘Death Star’ was, and didn’t really want to either.

Leaving the books and the mess of paint behind, the two of them made their way out into the corridor, where they discovered that Luke’s ‘Death Star’ key did indeed open all the barriers between sections of the main corridor of the hospital.

There were three painted suits in the west section of the fourth floor, but they were dispatched quickly enough, and though he still felt nothing in the Force outside of that brief flash that had saved his and Luke’s life earlier, Anakin could easily see the signs of Force sensitivity in Luke, whose accuracy with his blaster was astounding – at such a young age and in these conditions!

_Remember, he’s twenty-three, not twelve_ , he told himself. But still. He was impressed.

The door to the second stairwell was particularly saturated with black goop, but fortunately it was accessible from this side once he kicked away the chair that was jamming it. Anakin opened the door with his right hand and wiped it on his robe right after before he and Luke headed down.

As they descended, towards the basement, Anakin began to feel a little light-headed. He knew it was probably because of the lack of food – it had been… he had to think harder than he should have to remember it had been two days, but he didn’t feel hungry, and he didn’t really want to eat.

_Jesse is going to be so pissed at you when you get back_ , he told himself.

_If he’s still all right himself_.

Anakin prayed he’d been able to get some rest and sleep, because he had sounded like he’d really needed it during their last check-in.

However, something else told him the lightheadedness was coming from the Force. Like a distant scream he was hearing from under water, the Force was trying to warn him of something, but all he felt was slightly odd.

_Concentrate on that feeling_ , his teachers might have told him. _Use it to re-establish your connection with the Force._

_I don’t have the time_ , he told them in his head. _I need to concentrate on finding Obi-Wan._

_Let go of your attachments. Trust in the Force._

_I. Can’t. Just add it to the list of reasons I suck as a Jedi and let me get back to finding Obi-Wan._

_If you were a better Jedi, you’d be enough in tune with the Force that you’d have found him already._

He couldn’t argue with that one. He supposed he should be glad that the ‘hole’ in the Force was keeping Luke from sensing his frustrations, otherwise he’d have probably been getting some funny looks.

Things hadn’t changed in the basement in the last… kriff it, who knew how much time was passing in this awful place? Not that Anakin had expected Vader to drop by for a spot of spring cleaning, but he was a little surprised Luke didn’t seem to react to the mess.

Then again, he was from Tatooine. For some reason Anakin had to keep reminding himself of that, like someone as bright-eyed as Luke couldn’t possibly have come out of that pile of sand. But Luke stepped over a particularly large puddle of black and pulled a key card out of his pocket.

“Here’s the chapel,” he said, holding the key up to the lock. It was the room that had ‘Altar Room’ on the door, but Anakin didn’t particularly care about the name discrepancy.

With a significantly more strangled-sounding buzz, the door stuttered open. About a third of the way.

“Hmm,” said Luke.

Anakin came forward and put both hands on the edge of the door, yanking it into the wall with all his strength. It didn’t open all the way, but was there was now at least enough of a gap for him and Luke to squeeze through.

As soon as he was over the threshold, his heart sank.

It wasn’t that there was some horrendous monstrosity lurking in the Sith chapel. There was no static on his communicator and the room was actually cleaner than most of the rest of the med centre. It was about the same size as the Activities Room, with old-fashioned wooden floors and walls, and rows of little wooden benches facing a plain, kind of pathetic-looking raised platform, in front of an old, worn curtain that covered much of the opposite wall.

Not particularly outrageous – no mangled bodies, stained blood spatter, ornaments made out of skulls or anything obvious that might have come to mind, but this room was…

… quiet. Like he’d walked into a vacuum where nothing that seemed to be inside it was real. Like he’d been able to work through whatever was blocking the Force just enough to feel it without realising, and now it was extinguished from his mind completely and he felt it.

Anakin started to breathe harder, his heart pounding. There was something very wrong with this room.

“I have a bad feeling about this place,” Luke muttered.

_You shouldn’t be down here_ , Anakin just about stopped himself from saying. The kid was almost like a Padawan – he had some training after all – and it wouldn’t do to freak out in front of him.

“Let’s take a closer look,” he suggested.

There wasn’t much to look at. A door in the corner on the left as you came in that seemed to have no lock but wouldn’t open – probably controlled directly from the mainframe; a few, small, empty shelves and a tiny, oval picture frame on the wall holding a painting of small, white flowers.

Luke studied the door first, while Anakin wandered slowly through the benches, towards the platform. There seemed to be nothing of any interest in the room, but something strange was happening here.

A floorboard creaked.

_For fuck’s sake_ , thought Anakin.

The raised platform had a hole in it that Anakin guessed might lead down to a power system, probably for a standing microphone or some kind of display. He could have blasted it open, but first he wanted to check the rest of his surroundings – and every step he was taking closer to the curtain at the back of the room made the place seem to feel emptier. It was almost nauseating.

_There is no emotion_ , he reminded himself. _There is no emotion. Especially not fear._

_Especially not for a curtain._

He moved away from the platform, to the back wall. Time to see if there was anything back here that could vindicate these terrible feelings.

It wasn’t the Force. The Force was life, it filled him with strength. This felt like it was sucking it all out of him.

“Find something?” Luke asked.

_Anakin_.

Anakin blinked, thinking for a second that he’d heard his name called from behind the wall at the same time as Luke had spoken. He shrugged it off.

“Stay there a moment, there’s something back here,” he said.

Luke hesitated, an Anakin took the opportunity to pull the raggedy drape away, revealing the door that was behind it and the letters printed on it:

**MATERNITY WARD**

_Maternity Ward?_ How many babies were they expecting to deliver at this psychiatric institution?

And why was it at the back of a Sith chapel in the basement?

“What is it?” Luke asked.

_Anakin._

There it was again. And this empty feeling – it had to mean danger, didn’t it?

“Just stay back!” Anakin snapped.

Luke rolled his eyes. “I’m not a kid you know. Come on – let me help!” And he started storming towards Anakin, this time determined to join him in facing whatever the hell was on the other side of the door.

Reminded once again of Ahsoka, Anakin gave Luke an unimpressed look, then glanced around the chapel behind them, then back at the door in front of him.

There was a symbol of a Republic cruiser on the lock.

“Wait,” he said, and for the moment Luke did. “Go back to the other door, I think I see how to open it.”

Again, Luke did as he asked, and Anakin slipped the cruiser pendant-key out of his pocket while his back was turned.

_Sorry, kid. But you’re not going in there._

Just as Luke was a step away from the door, Anakin pushed the button on the pendant. The Maternity Ward door opened with a buzz and he slipped inside –

“Hey!” cried Luke.

… and pressed the button for the door to close behind him. He caught a glimpse of Luke running towards him, but not fast enough.

“Oh, come on, Anakin!” Luke yelled at him through the door.

“Just stay there and wait for me!” Anakin called back. “There’s something dangerous in here and I need you to stay put.”

He heard Luke groan on the other side of the door, but while he said nothing Anakin could turn and take a good look at the room he’d walked into.

It was much bigger than most of the other rooms he’d found inside the centre so far – metal walls and floors; old, but cleaner than most of the building. Screens and terminals around the room were dead, but there was a rudimentary, greenish light coming in that he was able to see by, though he still kept his flashlight on.

There were two rows of small glass pods along one section of the room, lined with white baby blankets. Some had been knocked out of alignment, and there was only one, adult sized birthing bed behind that. When Anakin looked at that bed the light seemed to get brighter, and flicker white, and for a moment it made it look like he was seeing an entirely different hospital room, but when he blinked a few times it went back to the rusty piece of crap beneath poor light that he had seen first.

Luke hit his fist against the door. “Anakin, I know you’re a Jedi Knight and I don’t have much training, but I’ve been in battles with much tougher enemies than those floating troopers!”

_Well, you shouldn’t have been_ , thought Anakin, though he didn’t look back at the door.

Instead his eyes fell on the last part of the room – two standard-sized bacta tanks flanking one, super-sized tank. All three looked extremely old and obsolete, the metal surrounding them an outdated, copper colour. To Anakin’s disgust they were all full, bacta solution sitting there in the tank for who knew how long. He was about to approach further for a better look at the mechanical side of things when he stopped.

There was a thumping sound in the ceiling above him. Anakin looked up.

Silence.

…

…

Then, in an explosion of bubbles and movement, something dropped into the bacta tank at the end of the row, suspended on two rusty chains. Something huge, and…

… Force, what the hell was that _thing?!_

“Anakin come on!” Luke whined on the other side of the door. “Let me in!”

He hit the door twice more but Anakin barely heard him, too engrossed by the apparition that had oozed into the tank before him and certainly not about to invite Luke inside to have to deal with it.

The creature was purple-ish, a massive lump with the texture of scarred skin that had become a single, giant bruise: red in some areas, blue in more. It was vaguely rectangular in shape, with uneven, knobby edges and a huge sac protruding from its front, with a line down the centre of this bulge stained black and stitched together with a massive length of what looked like a thick cable.

His eyes were drawn then to three, particularly disturbing egg-like bumps at the top and side of this thing. Each one had a crease at the bottom, but it was only when one by one they split apart that Anakin realised they were eyes – red-rimmed blue and staring at him through the liquid with…

… _resignation._

“Anakin! Anakin, what’s going on in there – the static is going crazy, talk to me!”

Before Anakin could move, let alone answer, he was transfixed by the black, tar-like dribble coming out of the slit down the monster’s enormous stomach, and the two lights that began to glow from within.

“Anakin!”

The lights pressed against the inside of the bulge, and pushed, seeping out through the gaps in the stitching – they were fingers! As Anakin watched in fascinated horror they dug out and pried the edges of the wound apart, snapping the cable stitching where they touched it and pushing out against the glass: these two glowing, burning hands on the ends of raw, red, snake-like arms. Black gunk poured out of the wound around it.

When the edges of the belly wound were pulled further apart a rounded, larger mass poked itself out, and its palms sizzled through the glass of the bacta tank and shattered it, the liquid splashing out onto the tiled floor and rushing towards Anakin’s boots.

The creature was suspended on its chains – the blue-ish purple, limbless trunk with its staring eyes and this other thing that was coming out of it like a gigantic, red maggot. The second creature reared up still half inside the first, and Anakin saw its own eyes had been stitched over above a wide, round, mouth crammed with razor-sharp teeth.

Then it wailed, and it sounded like a distorted, low-pitched child in the throes of a tantrum. Anakin stumbled back, towards the door, not taking his eyes off the thing.

The long, wriggling arms of the red thing got longer still, and amazed Anakin further in their next move, when they wrapped around the back of the host monster and then punched through its upper body, avoiding the eyes and coming out again to curl their long fingers into claw-like shapes – poised threateningly at Anakin, black oily slime dripping out of all the wounds.

_Fuck._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I believe this is what we call a 'boss fight', Anakin. Stay tuned to see how our hero fares next week!
> 
> ... if any of you still care what happens to Anakin, after hearing how heartlessly he reacted to the death of Little X'ell in 'Winds of Freedom'. I tell you, that one hit me right in the feels, guys. Oscar Wilde concurs.


	11. What's in the Box?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Greetings, readers! Thank you so much for your reading, and for leaving kudos and/or a comment should you have chosen to do so. As always, I love hearing your thoughts and am always happy to discuss.
> 
> This week, Anakin fights a boss, has another dose of flashback, finds himself in a completely different building (or does he?) and is challenged to discover 'What's in the Box?' - in what I believe is referred to as 'The Big-Lipped Alligator Moment' of this story!
> 
> Hope you all enjoy it!
> 
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>

The disgusting parasitic creature came towards Anakin with its hands swinging, and Anakin drew and ignited his lightsaber instinctively to block its attack.

He didn’t pay much attention to the fact that the blade stayed solid this time – the arms of the creature were fast and struck at him in quick succession, forcing him to block and dodge simultaneously. The glowing orange palms of the creature’s hands met and withstood the blows of his saber, which made him anxious that they might, somehow, have similar properties.

And if that was the case, a slap from this thing could take his head off.

With another infantile cry of rage the creature dragged itself along the ceiling, or was dragged by the chains, and attacked Anakin from another angle. He had to duck into a roll to avoid it and backed around to where the smashed bacta tank was.

Then the Force gave him a clear message, and he reacted – swinging out at the same time as he dodged and getting behind the blow of the creature. His blade sliced cleanly through the flesh and bone of the left arm, sending an arm’s length of it tumbling to the floor with a heavy thump, the red-hot hand hissing against the floor.

The creature shrieked and retreated towards the other side of the room, by the monitors. Anakin had geared up to follow it and press his advantage, but then something strange happened –

On the ‘host’ creature, the three blue eyes suddenly started glowing. Afraid that there was some kind of energy weapon inside this monster, Anakin hung back, and watched as the three glowing lights retracted from the eyes, black tar spilling over their lids. The lights moved through the body towards the hole through which the two thirds or so that remained of the red parasite’s left arm was poking out of… and then _fed themselves_ , somehow, into the red, bloody arm.

Anakin saw where this was going, insane though it and everything else about this grotesque abomination was, and rushed forward, cursing his earlier hesitancy.

The glowing lights created round bulges in the arm as they slid down, reaching the end where Anakin had cut it just in time to block his attack.

In only a few moments, the three lights merged at the end of the arm and morphed into a distorted hand shape. Then there was a new hand on the end of it, slapping Anakin’s lightsaber away.

He spun to avoid the follow-up strike from the right hand, but when he raised the blade to block the fingers of the hand closed around it like a vice, and before he realised it the creature yanked the blade out of his hands with an enraged roar and threw it to the side of the room.

Anakin had to move quickly to avoid another hit, and though its left arm was now considerably shorter than its right, the monster was revitalised, and it swung forward on its chain to attack him, screaming its terrible, child-like scream as more black gunk drooled out of its mouth.

With the Force unreliable for now and no time to get to his lightsaber the conventional way, Anakin switched to the rifle, and shot the creature three times in quick succession. It flinched at the impact of each shot, and yelled in pain, but then it kept moving toward him as though nothing had happened.

Anakin had to believe it had achieved _something_ though, and he wove under the creature’s arms and made a dash to the other side of the room to line up another shot. The creature was relatively fast, but ungainly – it had yanked itself moving too quickly on its chains and had to re-adjust before it could chase after Anakin. This cost it. Anakin fired again, three shots in a row, each striking the red parasite dead on. Its screams were blood-curdling, but it went right for him as soon as there was a break in the volley.

Again, Anakin managed to dodge, and this was not an intelligent monster by any means; it made the same mistake as before in its haste and left him an opening to avoid and fire at it from a distance.

Seeing a pattern to attack it emerging, Anakin allowed himself a few seconds of thought towards the disgusting thing. What the hell was it, and what had the Sith been trying to do in creating it? Was this parasite something like the brain worm they’d discovered on Geonosis, only gigantic and somehow a hundred times as horrific?

But the host didn’t exactly make much sense either. No species Anakin knew could survive the kind of wounds that the parasite had given it, but its three eyes looked human, and they were _still blinking_.

_The host_ , he wondered, weaving out of the way of another arm swing and rushing to a safe distance for another volley, _would shooting it have a different effect to shooting the parasite?_

With a quick release of doubt into the Force, Anakin lined his shot up at one side of the host and pulled the trigger. And it did have a different effect.

The parasite shrieked much louder than before and convulsed on its chains wildly, throwing its arms out in a display so wild that Anakin hesitated. But this worked against him, because he stalled just as one of the two chains holding up the monster snapped apart, lurching the creature to one side.

With its right arm now enjoying a longer reach, it swung out, and Anakin couldn’t block in time. The full force of its red-hot blow hit him on his left side – slamming him into the wall with a crash, then a larger crash when he tumbled onto the little pods, knocking them over and smashing two.

Pain exploded into both sides, particularly where he’d landed after falling through the skylight earlier, and he let out a strangled cry. Everything went blank for a long moment, keeping him from fully appreciating how he at least hadn’t been chopped in half by that blow.

He could feel the furious burn of the handprint on his side; scorching, blinding, layers of skin pulling away from him. But there was one silver lining.

The monster had thrown him into almost the same spot it had thrown his lightsaber. Anakin couldn’t see, but he could feel it near him in the Force.

_This weapon is your life._

Without thinking he called it into his hand, swung it upward, and severed a second arm from the monster.

More ear-splitting wails cut through the ringing in Anakin’s ears, but he was too dazed by the impact and the pain to follow that strike up, or do more than roll away from the other hand that hit out at him while bringing his saber up for a block when it tried grabbing at him.

_Get up,_ he told himself angrily. _Come on, you saw it retreat when you cut off its first arm, you’ve got to get up and press your advantage._

_It’s just a little bit of pain. You’re hardly dying; get up!_

He sensed the creature move away to regenerate as it had the first time and, painstakingly, clambered to his feet using the wall as support. His lightsaber skimmed along the metal floor as he swayed on unsteady legs, sending a spray of sparks into the air.

_Come on, get up and fight!_

_Trust in the Force,_ Obi-Wan would have told him. _Reach out and let it guide you._

Physical pain could definitely be a barrier to overcome, but for a Jedi it wasn’t necessarily the most debilitating thing that could happen. So, now the Force was reaching him again, it was possible for Anakin to release some of his pain into it, and re-focus on the battle at hand.

He looked up, and saw the three glowing lights from the host creature’s eyes sliding towards the hole the parasite’s right arm had torn through it. The red thing had not liked it when he’d attacked its host, so he must have been on the right track in doing so – he just had to get to it before the second arm regrew and avoid the first.

This was easier, with the first arm being so short now. Anakin felt out the screaming creature (creatures?) in the Force to discern their intentions before he struck again, and found his gaze drawn instantly to the three blue, human-like eyes of the host. Blackness dripped copiously from the sockets, but the eyes themselves were dull, like they didn’t care about the pain they were in – and he could feel a lot of pain in this thing.

It was like the host was pleading with Anakin to kill it.

Stars knew what the Sith had done to get it like that. Anakin took a deep breath and raced for the monster with his saber up, blocking the hand that flew towards him with a quick strike that didn’t give its fingers time to close around the blade. He dove beneath the monster, feeling hanging clumps of flesh brush the top of his hair with a shudder, and propelled himself to the other side of the creature.

Hanging from those chains, it could not turn quickly at all – nor was its rear as easily defended. Anakin cut a straight line up its back with as powerful a swing as he could, pouring anything he could of the Force into his strike to pull the sides of flesh apart all the further.

But before he could realise his victory, his lightsaber stuck fast, at the top of the trunk, between where the chains were fused in. The monster’s cry was awful; choking, gasping, like it was ripping its way out of its throat. It still sounded like a baby, dying.

Anakin tugged on the hilt of his sabre but the blade would not come free. The monster began to thrash, wildly, with tremendous strength that had Anakin yanked around with its movements. The whole room seemed to shake with the force of the monster’s death throes.

_Let go of the saber, idiot,_ he told himself.

But at the same time Obi-Wan’s voice was in his head, telling him, _this lightsaber is your life._

He held on, and with a mighty sharp twist that made his arm feel like it was being cut off a second time, he was thrown clear from the monster.

At the same time and at long last, the creature fell back, the remaining chain snapped, and it fell onto the floor with a crash much louder than it should have.

The room went suddenly, eerily quiet.

Anakin got up, almost breathless, and cautiously approached the monster. There was no movement. In his heart, he felt the energy of the creature, all rage and agony, dissipating into the Force – though it seemed more and more distant every second, like a scrap of paper, burning into ash.

Then –

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOOEEEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOO

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOOEEEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOO

The sirens!

The same sirens that had called Vader away from him before were blaring out now – louder and louder, swelling inside his head like a balloon blowing up. Putting his hands to his ears did practically nothing: his whole body seemed to vibrate with the Force of that terrible sound.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOOEEEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOO

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOOEEEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOO

The howl of those sirens pierced through every fibre of him, and Anakin felt himself slipping into darkness.

*~*~*~*~*

_Anakin…_

_Anakin…_

_Anakin…_

_Anakin…_

_Anakin…_

He could hear his name over the sirens like it was coming at him through water. He could see… blue?

_Anakin…_

He saw the dusty beige walls of The Palace, back in Mos Espa, coming into focus all around him. No matter how many times he had to go down to this place, his mother always took him aside beforehand to make sure he understood the truth of it – no matter how much Watto complained or mocked her.

“Now, Ani, what do we keep in mind always, when we go to The Palace?”

‘We’ was figurative. Anakin always went alone.

“It’s a bad place,” he’d tell her.

“Yes, my son. The people who work there are made to give up parts of themselves that should not be for sale. Ani, you must never go there if you don’t have to – do you understand?”

“Yes, Mom.”

The sorrow in her eyes haunted him still. He couldn’t have borne it, he thought now, if he’d been in her place and had to stay at the shop and scrub floors while his only child went to that cesspit on the orders of that sleazebag flying rat.

“It’s a very unkind place,” she told him. It must have been hard to get that across to a child so young. “And we must always try to be kind, Ani. You promise me?”

“I promise.”

There was nothing for it, though, while the Jedi were still years away from finding him. If there was one place on Tatooine you didn’t want the air conditioning to break, it was The Palace, but Ringa had been a cheap piece of shit, and never paid to get a system long past it’s use-by date replaced.

Thus, someone had to go and fix it every couple of months. And Ringa could pay Watto in a line of credit rather than in money, unlike other mechanics who probably had too much self-respect to frequent the place, so off Anakin would go, tools in hand, to the doors of Mos Espa’s most popular brothel to keep the assholes who patronised the place from getting too overheated during their ‘fun’.

Usually it was just the empty rooms he was sent into. Now and again they were occupied by a belligerent customer who refused to move from his spot until the air-con in their room was fixed, but very rarely did they not see Anakin and immediately stop trying to harass the slave they’d been given for the night. These guys were assholes, but most of them had however much decency you needed not to try and have sex with an unhappy slave in front of an eight-year-old.

Then one time the system had all but completely broken down and Anakin was waiting in the front room to explain to Ringa that he needed access to her generator in order to fix the air-con this time. Ringa had been with customers though, and he’d had to wait.

“Twilek party! Twilek party!”

Two humans, a rhodian and an ithorian were chanting from a long couch, already drunk and laughing raucously.

Ringa, a weequay with a smirk that made her look permanently contemptuous of everyone in her path, gestured out towards a curtained doorway, and the slave girls who came through the curtain – happy smiles plastered on their faces.

“Indeed, gentlemen, let me show you our twileks. I can assure you, you won’t find girls who know how to have fun better than these!”

There had been four. One, a tall, deep turquoise, two light, spring green, and one a rich, clay-orange.

“Pfft!” the human nearest cried. “I know we’re in the arse-end of nowhere, but we’ve got better standards than a fucking orange skank.” His companions all laughed. “Looks like she just came out of the oven!”

As they laughed harder, Anakin felt the orange twilek flinch – and it was weird, because to the eye she looked perfectly still.

“Nini is one of our most popular girls,” Ringa protested. “It’s true she’s orange, but gentlemen – colour doesn’t matter in the dark. She’s the best dancer in all of Mos Espa. Very… flexible.”

While Nini stretched a little to show off her flexibility the ithorian looked like he might be considering what she had to offer, but the rhodian threw his arm around him, cackling –

“I know that look, you dumb bastard. We just got a thirty percent bonus – we can do better than fucking orange for once!”

Anakin felt his face twist into a frown.

All physical attributes in all species had their admirers. But some were admired by more than others. Twileks, considered one of the most attractive of all sentient species, had had bestowed upon them by the galaxy at large a rigid hierarchy of perceived ‘beauty’ in their many different colours.

Deep, ocean blue was thought the most beautiful – like golden hair and blue-eyes were in humans. Then the lighter, sky-blue, the turquoise – light, then dark, and then forest green, followed by progressively lighter greens, with all the shades of purple roughly equivalent depending on who you talked to. Orange was generally the least favoured – especially the lighter, more earthy orange that Nini’s skin bore.

“As you wish,” said Ringa with a grin, “Back to the bar, Nini.”

“Yes, Madame.”

But Nini decided to take a different route to the one she’d come in by, and the ithorian’s gaze had followed her – and landed on Anakin, when she went his way.

“… what?” he slurred. “Why is there a little kid there?”

Ringa’s cruel eyes snapped toward Anakin and narrowed, her teeth baring.

“Oh,” she crooned. “Don’t mind him, he’s the junker’s slave, here to do the maintenance – boy, if you’re finished then go back to your master; you’re bothering my customers.”

Having become impatient at this point Anakin was unwisely short when he replied, “I haven’t finished, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I need to look at the actual generators this time – there’s probably something stuck in them!”

So swiftly was Ringa at his side that she almost seemed to have the Force, and her hand was sharp and merciless when she sliced it down onto his forehead with a thwack.

Anakin whimpered, his hands flying up to his head where she’d struck him – the edge of her nail drawing a bead of blood next to his hairline.

One of the men on the couch snorted into his drink with laughter.

“Don’t you speak to your betters that way, little brat! What do you mean you haven’t fixed it? My patrons can’t be expected to enjoy themselves in the blistering heat! Get a move on!”

Very quickly on the verge of tears, Anakin tried once more to explain – “But I need to see the generators – “

Ringa grabbed a handful of his hair and dragged him around with a yelp so that he was facing another door.

“Through there, down to the end of the hall through the steel door then down the steps and through the red door opposite. Now get to work – or I’ll have your hide whipped clean off you!”

Anakin wanted to get to it as soon as possible and picked up his tool box to leave before Ringa decided to hurt him some more or the men laughed even harder than they already were. The two lighter-green twileks were laughing at him too.

But Nini had stepped forward, hand outstretched, and with a thick accent protested, “Madame Ringa, he can’t go downstairs – he’s just a little boy!”

“He’ll only be passing through, you silly girl, now get back to work!”

“But he’ll see…” Nini trailed off, clearly realising Ringa wouldn’t care about that. “It… it will bother the guests, if they see a child down there, Madame!”

That had made Ringa think twice. Her brow furrowed in irritation.

“Well we can’t have no air-con in the rooms, he’s going to have to go down and I’m not waiting until morning!”

“What’s in the basement?” Anakin asked.

He regretted it, because it was the second time in less than a minute that he’d spoken out of turn, but this time Ringa’s eyes caught a gleeful fire in them, and she told him,

“The Croaking Man, child. Down in the basement, behind the heavy door, at the bottom of the long, dark staircase behind the locked door is the room of the Croaking Man. And you had better not wake him up, boy. I wouldn’t dream of sending any of my good girls down there, but a nasty, filthy little boy like you will be made quick work of, I’m sure!”

“If I could go with him, Madame – “

“Yes, yes, go on then, get out of my sight the pair of you. If you can’t fix things up again, boy, Watto will sell you on to someone who can make more use of you. Maybe he’ll hand you down to me. _I’ll_ find a use for you, make no mistake!”

Nini hurried to take his hand and lead him to the door Ringa had pointed out. Her hand was soft and cool to the touch. Anakin was quick to comply with her direction, his little heart fluttering with worry that this woman might just kill him like cruel masters he’d heard about in stories. Watto would have only made as much fuss as would get him a heftier compensation payment out of her, after all.

Yet Anakin heard, as they reached that door –

“You wouldn’t really… have a little kid here, would you?”

Hardly the cream of the crop as he was in terms of sentient life, still the man who’d called Nini an ‘orange skank’ had sounded disgusted at the thought.

“No, no, of course not,” Ringa said. Anakin heard her voice fading away as he and Nini hastened through the door. “But they need to know their place, you know. That one’s on loan, but I’ll have you know my girls and boys are – “

_Anakin…_

_Anakin…_

_Anakin…_

He could see light from beyond the water, but he couldn’t touch it… there was a wall of some sort in the way…

_Anakin…_

_Anakin…_

“You shouldn’t listen to those jerks, Nini,” he told her, as she accompanied him down the hall. “I think you’re very pretty.”

She smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “Thank you, Ani. But I don’t care about what those men think of me.”

“Good, because they’re all morons.”

With a little laugh, she ruffled his hair. “You’re not, though. You must be very smart to be able to fix all these machines, when you’re only…”

“Eight. And a quarter. But it’s not that hard, really.”

“I couldn’t do it.”

Because she’d sounded quite despondent, Anakin had tried to reassure her, “Sure you could. Why don’t you come into the generator room with me, and I’ll show you!”

Nini’s smile almost disappeared.

“… I’d better wait outside, Ani. That way I can keep the guests from disturbing you.”

They reached the door then: heavy, durasteel and ominous, with no unique features but the signs of a lack of care. Nini hesitated, and Anakin could tell she didn’t want to go down there – and especially not with him.

“There isn’t really a croaking man down there, is there?” he asked her. He had a feeling she wouldn’t make fun of him just for asking.

“No, Ani. Just our ‘special’ guests.”

“Are they all very unkind? My Mom says the people who come here are unkind.”

He had a feeling from that door, something he thought felt very much like ‘unkindness’, if something like that could give off a feeling in that way. His hand drew back almost as soon as he reached for the open button.

“… some of them aren’t so bad, I guess. But listen – before we go down there there’s something that I have to tell you. There are things down there it isn’t good for you to see, little Ani.”

_Anakin…_

_Anakin…_

He lay on a soft surface in the cool, Coruscant air. The stars were out and Chancellor Palpatine leaned over him, a harsh light shining on his face – his pale blue eyes seeming almost electric beneath the glare.

“There you are, Anakin. We’ve been waiting for you.”

Waiting…

Had there been an engagement, that he was supposed to attend with the Chancellor? Was there something he hadn’t prepared for? Was there danger?

“… Chancellor…?”

“Come along now, Anakin, there’s a good boy. I’m pleased to tell you that the time has almost come.”

The time? What was he… ?

“You’re very nearly due. It’s exciting, isn’t it?”

He needed to get up. If the Chancellor had been waiting for him and he’d been asleep…

Anakin took in the surroundings – bubbling waterfall, hedgerow dotted with white flowers that glowed in the moonlight, buzz of guests under the pergola not so far away. He ran his fingers through his hair, surprised by the shortness of it, and the long braid at the back, until his memory began to shift things into place.

“Who did you have in mind?”

Yes, he knew where he was. He’d been here before, hadn’t he? That wedding… two warring factions united with an arranged marriage – Obi-Wan had negotiated the terms and the Chancellor had been invited to attend. What had they been talking about again, before he’d nodded off to that terrible dream?

“… Chancellor?”

“Who did you have in mind as a candidate? You seemed very sure Master Kenobi ought to be married himself someday, I thought you might have a spouse for him in mind.”

…

…

“Ah. I know that look.”

_Busted,_ thought Anakin, remembering exactly where they’d left off with uncomfortable clarity.

“I know” he muttered. “It’s forbidden by the Order even if he did agree to it, which he wouldn’t. He treats me like a little kid. But I…”

Palpatine smiled and sat down next to him. “I’m not surprised. You’ve certainly extolled Master Kenobi’s virtues often enough in the past.”

“He’s _perfect_ ,” said Anakin, miserably. “He’s always in control of himself, he knows everything, and he always knows what to do too.” He exhaled heavily. “I’m too dumb to be his padawan.”

“We all feel that way, sometimes,” Palpatine told him, glancing off into the distance for a moment. “But you have to remember, Master Kenobi has been a Jedi much longer than you have. It’s only natural that he should know things you don’t and have skills that you’re still honing.”

He knew that, but…

“He’s not _that_ much older than me,” he pointed out. “Only sixteen years. There were lots of people on Tatooine who were way more older than the person they were dating.”

You knew it was bad when he was looking to Tatooine for a justification. But he had fallen into the ice on Yrinst and Obi-Wan had stripped them both and held him in his arms to save his life – and Anakin had felt him, skin to skin, and Obi-Wan had done nothing but try to talk him through the cold. That meant something, didn’t it?

It did to him.

“Well yes, of course – here on Coruscant too, and all over the galaxy,” Palpatine assured him. “But, Anakin, what would you understand from me – were I to say the phrase ‘ _power dynamics’_?”

_Anakin…_

_Anakin…_

“Many struggle with her phrasing, but she believed strongly that one’s path towards the Force is a journey of the inner self, not the outer. Your master – and all those who are close to you – exist outside of that, as their own, separate selves. So when she says ‘If you see your Master along the way, strike your master down’, it cannot be the separate self of your master that you destroy. Their journey and your journey do not intersect, though you will both end up in the same place eventually.”

“But why would we have to strike them down?”

“Because if you see your master along that path, it is only a part of your master that is holding you back, and ultimately, a part of – ”

_Anakin…_

“I fear Bariss may be forming a little crush on me.”

Luminara sounded rueful, though not entirely surprised, and Obi-Wan chuckled gently, but old anxieties came back to Anakin like a ship dropping out of hyperspace, and he found himself standing up with a loud guffaw.

“That’s ridiculous!” he cried, then drank down the rest of his caf in a single swig before slamming it back on the table. “Why would any Padawan develop feelings for their Master? All they ever do is make your life miserable, right, Snips?”

“I said don’t call me that!”

“Exactly. And wipe that grin off your face, Cody – that’s an order.”

He knew technically Cody wasn’t bound to follow said order, but Obi-Wan rolled his eyes, and with a dismissive wave said, “Better do as he says, Commander. Good soldiers follow orders, after all.”

_Anakin…_

_Anakin…_

_Wake up, little Jedi…_

_Anakin…_

_I’m waiting for you._

Anakin opened his eyes to a blurry, indistinct orange surrounding, his throat constricted somehow, his orientation awry and his limbs moving strangely. But he’d felt this before, and realised as his awareness came back to him that he was floating in a liquid chamber.

Helpless to any enemies that might come to attack him, Anakin struggled, reaching out into the Force and pushing as hard as he could. He shattered the wall between him and the outside world and surged forward with the liquid – held back suddenly by his throat being yanked from the inside – his hands flew up to his mouth to find a solid object over it.

He pulled, his feet touching a solid surface he struggled to balance upright on, and easing himself back he dislodged the offending item from his mouth, and the airway it had been shoved down, then held on to the tube so that he didn’t fall without it in his throat. He stood there and gasped for breath then, as he searched for something resembling bearings.

_Oxygen mask,_ he realised. _You were in a kriffing bacta tank, idiot_.

Still fully clothed, bacta solution pouring off him in rivulets, he checked briefly to make sure his right arm hadn’t suffered for the soak and surveyed his surroundings.

Where the hell was he _now?_

The room was lit, which might have been a welcome change, but the light was harsh and inadequate – orange, like firelight. There were six bacta tanks in two rows of three, counting the one he’d broken out of, and like the ‘Maternity Ward’ in the basement the floors and walls were basic, ugly metal.

Being drenched turned out to have a silver lining to it – because the heat was sweltering. Anakin struggled to think of anywhere he’d experienced something like this before, and could only come up with Mustafar – the planet where he and Ahsoka had once rescued Force-sensitive children kidnapped by Cad Bane. Why the hell was that kind of heat being replicated here, in Silent Hill?

Unless…

Anakin reached for his communicator, only to find it missing. In fact, all his gear was missing.

He panicked for a split-second before a slight glance to his right revealed the lot of it, lying on a table by his side.

_Luke probably left it here for me,_ he thought, as he began clipping things back to his belt and sleeve pockets. _I must have had internal injuries from that… thing that I fought._

_But where is he now?_

Anakin paused before taking the last two items from the table: the broken Sith holocron and his own lightsaber.

With a brief thanks for coming through when he needed it, he put the weapon back in its place and observed the remaining object. Maul’s holocron. Was it really worth still lugging the thing around?

Knowing he shouldn’t, he picked it up and listened to the rattle of whatever had come loose inside it, then peered over its sharp lines, and the unfamiliar symbols embossed upon it. Same as those in the printed books he and Luke had gone through? Probably, he decided.

Then he squinted at the markings on one face of it. Were those tiny holes, in the casing?

He shook his head and stowed the damn thing away again.

_Okay. Now to find the others and get out of here. Wherever here is – I can’t still be in the Med Centre…_

Anakin opened the door, which to his relief _did_ open, out onto a similarly-lit corridor of plain metal – lined with pipes no one had cared to cover up and dotted here and there with valves. One valve at the end of the corridor shot a burst of steam out into the oppressive air as he took in his surroundings.

_Maybe this is the Research Centre,_ he thought. _But if that’s true, then how did Luke get me here and where did he run off to? And where is Obi-Wan?_

The Force was blocked again, that careless exertion by which he had escaped the bacta tank had ripped him away from it. He couldn’t tell if Obi-Wan was even still alive, but –

He stopped in the corridor.

Only a few steps away from the room he’d woken up in, the first door he had come across had this sign:

**ACTIVITIES ROOM**

Anakin stared. He shouldn’t have been so perplexed, he supposed, that there was an Activities Room in this building too, but then he looked from side to side again and observed that the corridor was also the same length as the one in which he’d last seen a room with this sign on, and he felt a prickling along his scalp.

He pushed the button to open the door, only to be confronted with an incredibly grating, loud buzz of denial. Locked.

_You have the key to the Activities Room though. Remember?_

_This isn’t the same building though. It can’t be._

With a building sense of dread Anakin fished out the cruiser key pendant and pushed the button on it.

There was a click, and the door was unlocked. Anakin swallowed and pushed the ‘open’ button again, no longer making conclusions about his surroundings, only observing.

What he observed next was the static on his communicator, as three painted suits in a room with the same dimensions of the previous Activities Room dragged themselves upright from the floor they’d been immobile on and charged him.

These suits set themselves apart from the others Anakin had seen in that half the paint – both the luminous colours and the shiny white – had either flaked away or was obscured by reddish-brown streaks of who knew what. The white he could see was cracked, like it too would fall away any moment, and where the paint was gone were areas badly chipped and rough – like they’d eroded.

They were no less difficult to kill than their predecessors for this, however, and Anakin ran out of charges on the rifle at the end and had to finish the last one off with the blaster.

What really disturbed him though, were the empty bookshelves, thrown haphazardly in the corner of this stark, metal room. And on the floor, covers stained and falling apart, were six books. With foreboding, Anakin picked up the one nearest to him and flipped to the title page.

_My dear Oloré_

He snapped the book shut.

No.

There was no way.

This was Vader fucking with him somehow. It had to be. A whole med centre couldn’t just change into another building over a matter of hours!

Anakin dropped the book and stormed out of the room, heading right for where the elevator would have been back in the Silent Hill Med Centre. There was an elevator in the same place here too, and it worked – he heard the cables moving when he pushed the call button.

_Okay, think_ , he told himself. _This is just being done to screw with you, and you can’t let it. You can’t. Just get out of the building and re-orient yourself. You have to still be in Silent Hill or you’d be able to feel the Force. If you can’t find Obi-Wan or Luke then you need to go back to Jesse._

_Jesse…_

Trying to raise Jesse on his comm got him nothing but the most hideous sounding static yet, and then the elevator car arrived and the doors opened.

He almost didn’t go in; he was so taken aback. There was no light, but the orange glow from the corridors illuminated walls covered from ceiling to floor with black handprints, burned onto the metal like a psychotic toddler’s art installation. Anakin took a deep breath and headed inside anyway, switching his flashlight back on, but he soon found something else that made the small car seem smaller.

Which buttons were lit on the control panel had changed; he could go down to the basement, but not to the first floor.

And there was something else. The numbers on the buttons had also changed.

4

3

2

1

B1

B2

Anakin reached out and traced his finger over the last one, as if to test whether it was actually real. He felt the groove quite clearly, but was hardly comforted.

B2? Since when was there a second basement floor?

_Why shouldn’t there be when this is clearly a different building?_

Level B2 was not accessible via the elevator anyway, the light around the button was out and pressing it did nothing. So Anakin pressed for B1 and took a moment to compose himself as the doors shut.

_This is crazy_ , he told himself. _Why would Vader go to all this trouble? What the hell does he even want?_

Anakin didn’t even know where to start when it came to trying once more to think this whole absurd situation through. Nor might he have had much longer than an elevator ride to figure it out if there were more suits – or worse – in the basement.

_Live in the moment_ , he thought for what must have been the five millionth time that day. _Face the monsters as they come and figure it out when you’re all safe._

_Come on,_ a darker voice inside him said _. You know that only works when you have the Force to guide you. If you’re not going to try and figure this out, what hope do you have of – ?_

The elevator car suddenly jolted, and Anakin was snapped out of his thoughts rudely. He glanced around in case he could see the source of the problem in the car, but after stopping for only a moment he felt it start to move again – slowly. Very slowly.

Around him the elevator lights suddenly turned on – a weird, out of place mix of different colours coming from different sources flashing around in a showy manner, and above his head he heard the crackle of static, and a low, quiet note that got progressively louder and higher, until it was ringing in Anakin’s ears.

It was a PA system – he realised when a tell-tale click resounded and then confirmed with the notes that followed. A jaunty, cheesy tune played over the system, and Anakin tensed up.

Then the sound of recycled clapping and cheering joined the tune, leaving Anakin more bewildered than ever.

_What the…?_

“Ladies and gentlemen!” a voice called over the PA, “It’s that time again! Welcome to everyone’s fa-vour-ite show – the greatest game in the whole galaxy, it’s ‘What’s in the Box?’!” 

The cheering intensified. Anakin stared up at the ceiling of the elevator car, dumbstruck.

“Somewhere in the Silent Hill Med Centre is a secret door!” the voice continued – a man’s, dripping with the manufactured excitement of a gameshow presenter. Which, apparently, he was. “What’s behind the door? Nobody knows! But, in order to find out, our contestants will have to answer three questions correctly. Fail…”

The voice suddenly became more sinister.

“… and they’ll have to miss out on our fan-tas-tic prizes, and go home with _nothing!_ ”

More yelling from the audience. Anakin was still lost for words.

_What the fuck is going on? Is this an old recording of some kind of local –_

“Tonight’s lucky contestant is a very special guest,” cried the presenter, his voice high-pitched again – he practically shrieked on some syllables. “He’s one of the youngest Knights of the esteemed Jedi Order; a hero with no fear whatsoever – the Chosen One himself… ladies and gentlemen please give a warm welcome to Anakin Skywalker!”

The crowd in the background began shrieking and Anakin could hear them stamping their feet against the ground. He suddenly felt very cold, despite the heat.

Was Vader responsible for this? Was this just him screwing with Anakin’s head? But again, it didn’t feel like that grim and dour Sith would be behind something as… ridiculous as this, and Anakin was suddenly more sure than ever that there was something other than Vader at work in this wretched town.

However, he had no more than a moment to consider it, because the voice went on as soon as the cheering from the audience had died down enough.

“Okay, Anakin – here’s your first question. For years now, the galaxy has been torn asunder by a _devastating_ civil war!”

The attempt at sorrow for this that the presenter tried to inject into his words was the fakest Anakin had ever heard. One member of the audience screamed “Woo! Woo!” to show how sorry he was at that fact.

“Our brave, loyal Republic soldiers against the heartless, cruel Separatists, and their obsession with greed and power – causing untold misery and pain throughout untold systems and planets!”

More or less how Anakin saw things, but from this guy it somehow sounded just as oversimplified as Padme always complained.

“This band of soulless scumbags was led by the former Jedi Master and evil, treacherous Sith Lord… Count Dooku!”

Anakin’s heart began to beat faster. The audience all chorused “Boo! Boo!” and the presenter waited for the jeers to die down before he continued.

“Just recently, the Count came to his just deserts at the hands of our valiant Republic heroes!”

The audience cheered.

“… but how, exactly, was this devious villain finally dispatched? Was he A: sucked out into space following a hull breach, B: dismembered and decapitated with a lightsaber, or C: burned to a _crisp_ when his ship crashed into the side of a planet!”

Apparently the audience liked the third option the best, as that was the one they cheered the loudest for. Anakin was left frozen, a sick feeling spreading out inside him that made him want to wrap his arms around himself.

Vader knew – could have been watching him duel Dooku remotely as it happened with hidden surveillance, or felt it through their master-apprentice bond. But his bringing it up now had more serious implications that just a taunt to how much Anakin failed as a proper Jedi.

If Vader had proof of what had happened on _Invisible Hand,_ Anakin and Chancellor Palpatine both could have been in serious trouble.

So Anakin was going to have to deal with that.

Right now, he didn’t see any input for the answer, unless he was supposed to push the relevant elevator button…

But no – “Keep that answer in your head, Anakin: you’ll know when to use it.”

The audience laughed in the background, and Anakin’s mood soured further, irritation as well as horror and confusion.

“Next question,” said the presenter quickly. “The beautiful vacation resort of Silent Hill was founded over a thousand years ago by two Sith Lords whose beliefs diverged from the doctrine of the wider Sith Empire.”

_Oh_ , thought Anakin. _I guess that answers that – assuming I can trust any of this._

“These intrepid pioneers forged a unique community through their hard work and dedication – but! After a time, both were betrayed – by their _own children_!”

Again, the audience seemed to like that, and showed their appreciation with more shouts and cheers.

“Once they had met their grisly ends, who was it that stepped up to lead the town towards the glorious purpose its founders had envisioned? Was it A: Darth Phanti and Darth Zeall, B: Darth Oloré and Darth Caden, or C: Darth Sidious and Darth _Va-_ der!?”

The presenter cried out ‘Vader’ in a long, drawn out way, and the audience cheered harder than ever before.

Anakin wasn’t sure if he had taken in enough clues to know the answer to that one, but he was given no time to think on it, as the grating voice of the presenter continued –

“And finally… Tatooine is a desert planet on the fringes of Hutt space, ruled by that lovable, cuddly character, Jabba the Hutt!”

Anakin grimaced. _Here we go._

“The natives of the planet are a mysterious group of vile, uncivilised savages known as ‘Tusken Raiders’.”

The audience booed.

_No_ , thought Anakin.

_Please, no._

“Years ago, on the darkest of desert nights, an entire village of these dastardly scavengers was wiped out in only a few, _brutal_ minutes!”

More cheering. Anakin began to find it difficult to breathe. The presenter continued, voice filled with malevolent glee.

“Limbs flying… flesh sizzling… mothers screaming into the night – every living creature in the camp was butchered, down to the last, _helpless_ child…”

The cheering became so loud it felt like the elevator car was shaking, and Anakin stumbled on unsteady legs.

_He knows._

“What a _travesty_.” The presenter spoke without an ounce of sincerity. “What a rash, ill-fated act of _astounding_ ruthlessness against these unfortunate Tusken families.”

_How could he possible know… ?_

And even as Anakin silently begged for it not to happen the voice continued, “But who was the perpetrator of this appalling act of _senseless_ violence!?”

_They were…_

_So I slaughtered them like…_

“Was it A: Jabba the Hutt, B: Darth Maul, or C:”

He left a much longer pause, with a little chuckle thrown in.

“ … Anakin Sky-walk-er!”

Even now, with all the years between that night and this moment, Anakin still couldn’t say for sure that he felt as much as a scrap of guilt. Only the bottomless fear, for what everyone he knew – everyone who didn’t already know – what they would do if they found out.

What Obi-Wan would do, if he found out. Something so antithetical to everything the Jedi believed in. Everything. If there was any guilt in Anakin it was for the possibility that Obi-Wan would have to confront that kind of outrage from his own Padawan one day.

For the first time since he’d left the transport, he was grateful Obi-Wan wasn’t there with him. Only for a moment, but there it was.

The audience screamed their loudest approval yet, and over the thunderous applause Anakin could hear one woman among them yelling, “Kill them! Kill them all!”

“That’s all we’ve got time for today, folks!” The presenter announced cheerfully. “Let’s all send our best wishes to Anakin for the rest of his journey and hope that he remembers the answers to tonight’s questions, because if he doesn’t…”

After trailing off the presenter just laughed a few times and the audience soon joined in. Anakin was too stunned to care.

“Thank you for tuning in to ‘What’s in the Box?’ – we hope to see you again some time, and as always… _pleasant dreams!_ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, that just happened. 
> 
> But where have Luke and Obi-Wan ended up? Stay tuned for next week's chapter, and you may find out!
> 
> ... and you may also wish you hadn't! >:D


	12. The Altar

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, everyone! Let's celebrate this story getting over 100 kudos with the most HORRIBLE chapter yet! :D
> 
> Thank you for reading this far and thank you again if you've left kudos or a comment below. I very much appreciate any thoughts, questions, criticism and/or death threats you may feel the need to send my way.
> 
> In this chapter, Anakin opens some doors, and some very bad stuff happens (*cough* extra non-con warning for this chapter *cough*). Enjoy!
> 
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

With a burst of static the PA clicked off, the colourful lights flickered and died and the car started moving normally again. Anakin finally started breathing again, but when the elevator reached the first basement level he was still too much in shock to walk out on steady legs, and he stumbled over the threshold along a narrow corridor.

The basement level was much smaller than the others, so this path must have been necessary to get from the elevator to the other side of the building where the generator room was.

No, wait, this wasn’t even the same building – what was he thinking?

Whatever was going on, there was only one direction to go in, and he walked along almost sideways because the corridor was so narrow and he didn’t want to risk touching the pipes running along the wall – not when he could feel the intense heat coming off them.

His heartbeat wasn’t going back to normal. He tried to breathe in and out with more regularity to make it go down, but he couldn’t push that last question to the back of his mind.

_Who was the perpetrator of this act?_

They knew. If not Vader, then someone in the town knew. Somehow.

To Anakin’s knowledge, the only people who were aware of what had happened apart from himself were Padme and Chancellor Palpatine. Palpatine had no reason to tell anyone and if Padme ever decided to come clean, she would have gone straight to the Jedi Council, or some other legal authority. There was a possibility someone in the Lars family had been listening when Anakin had confessed to Padme; but he couldn’t see them telling anybody suspicious about it. Sand People were about on par with Sand _Wolves_ in the minds of the farmers of Tatooine.

… He remembered seeing a Tusken youth dragged through the centre of town by one. They’d been trying to steal water from a convoy – the manager had thought it would be… fun, Anakin supposed, to drag the kid into town, instead of shooting them on the spot. The crowd that had gathered – the laughing. Anakin had been curious at first but then scared, and when a poorly aimed rock clipped his shoulder he’d run back home.

That Tusken had been stoned to death over the course of hours – men, women, slaves, freemen, all different ages and species had cast the stones. The only person he’d seen who’d shown the slightest sympathy for the youth –

_“It’s terrible. A cruel, wicked thing to do to a person.”_

_“But, Mom – the Tusken was trying to steal the water! The merchants could die in the desert without water!”_

_“Yes, but Ani we must always treat people with goodness even if they are not good people. It doesn’t mean you’re nice to them, or do what they say, or don’t try to stop them if they’re doing something bad, but you never must actually try to cause other people to suffer.”_

_Mom._

Anakin stopped for a moment, his eyes stinging more than ever in the heat, and he wiped them on his sleeve.

_Mom, I’m sorry…_

“I hate them!”

_I was never the pure soul you thought I was._

“I slaughtered them!”

_… maybe you should have been the Chosen One, instead of me…_

With a deep breath, Anakin resumed his journey down the basement corridor, with only one other thought in mind. It was something that had been there for a while now but only recently, even as the idea of his crimes’ exposure had been thrown in front of him like a bombshell, had he really begun to realise the truth of it.

There was something wrong with this town.

Maul had said as much at the start, but all this time Anakin had just assumed some ancient energy field was blocking the Force and maybe had something to do with the monsters as well. Now he felt it might be something much worse.

The Sith who had founded this place… they’d _done_ something. Something that would have been condemned even by other Sith or they wouldn’t have broken away – and that was the scariest part.

Whatever it was, it had left its mark here.

And that was all Anakin was comfortable admitting to himself for just that moment, as he found the door at the end of the corridor. It had been shut with three large but simple bolt locks that he turned one by one, relieved to find the door opened easily after that simple act and he didn’t have to go hunt down three different kriffing keys hidden over the building of wherever the hell he was. He stepped out into an unfamiliar hallway with an eerily familiar layout – seven doors, counting the one he’d come in through. 

It was the same as the Med Centre basement, with the door he’d come in through corresponding with one of the two he’d found locked in the other building. And it had to be, he told himself again, another building. Even though the door opposite him said ‘Generator Room’, exactly where the generator room he’d found the animal’s nest in had been. Even though the door next to him said ‘Mainframe’, exactly where the mainframe he hadn’t been able to get into had been. Even though there was a room labelled ‘Chapel’, in the exact same spot he and Luke had gotten into the chapel in the Med Centre basement.

There was also no massive pile of rubbish at the end of the hall, just a bare wall with pipes and a large, hand-turned valve. However, blocking the door to the stairs where Anakin would have come down from in the other building, there was a huge black pile of cooled molten metal – a slow, red-hot trickle of which was continually adding to the pile even as Anakin watched.

Although the mainframe or generator room might have been the logical choices for him to try and effect some change from, Anakin found himself going back – no, going _to_ the ‘Chapel’ – on the off chance that he’d find Luke in the same place he’d left him in the other building.

_What would Luke think_ , he thought for the second time, _if he knew what you did that night?_

Shaking his head, Anakin made for the door, and was relieved to find something keeping it jammed open.

A spare power pack, compatible with the rifle he’d depleted earlier. It made him pause. Not that he liked looked a gift-bantha in the mouth, however he did find it a little suspicious.

But then, maybe Luke had left it?

He managed to get the door open all the way and stepped into the chapel with his sinking feeling getting worse. It wasn’t that it was an exact replica of the other chapel – the room was metal, lined with more pipes and backed with a number of chain-link fences all laid on top of each other, so thick that he couldn’t see what was behind them, or the sign on that same ‘wall’ that read plainly:

**KEEP OUT**

It was, however, the same size as the other chapel, with metal benches the same length as the wooden ones in that room had been, a door on his left in the same position as the one he’d tried to trick Luke into believing he could open in order to get him out of the way, and where that platform had been there was now a table, with a richly embroidered scarlet cloth upon it.

And a conspicuous, pyramid-shaped object.

_‘Altar Room’_ , he thought. _That was what the ‘Chapel’ said on the outside in the Med Centre._

Anakin approached cautiously. The pyramid was silver, not black, but he didn’t want to take any chances. Yet when he was close enough for a proper examination it seemed to him that this object was no more than a fancy ornament, in the shape of a Sith holocron. The only thing that struck him as significant was a design of tiny gold stars on one face of the pyramid. He took a holo-snap of it with his communicator just in case it proved useful.

He had a notion at the same time that he might want to compare it to the holocron he was actually carrying with him, but he dismissed it quickly enough, feeling he might as well do what a Jedi was supposed to for once in his life and not look at the holocron again.

Placing the silver pyramid back on the table he looked back to where he’d come in from, turning his attention to the other door – the one that had been inaccessible back in the chapel.

This was not that ‘chapel’, he kept reminding himself. He’d been moved in his sleep.

To prove that statement further: the other door had had no lock or handle of any kind. This door, by contrast, had a plain and simple keypad lock. Someone – Vader or otherwise – was screwing with his head.

_Forget that for now,_ Anakin told himself. _Don’t let the bastard get to you. Now – can you open this door?_

There were four cells on the keypad – not impossible to brute-force his way through, but try explaining that one to Obi-Wan when he finally found him _: sorry, Master, I had to try all ten thousand combinations before I got through._

He had to believe that he would see Obi-Wan again. That he’d shaken off his dizzy spell and was staying one step ahead of Vader and the other monsters, maybe actually figuring out a logical reason to why they could sometimes access the Force and get its use back for good, because Anakin was hardly a master puzzle-solver, he hadn’t a clue what the four-digit code –

Then it hit him:

A four-digit code. He’d come across a four-digit number hidden in the Med Centre that he hadn’t found a use for yet, hadn’t he? And there was no doubt in his mind after everything he’d experienced so far that those digits on the spines of Caden’s gifts to Oloré meant something.

He raised his hand to the keypad. Three, zero, two, five.

A high-pitched beep pierced though the room, and the door opened.

Obi-Wan ran out of the darkness towards him.

*~*~*~*

“Anakin!”

Anakin couldn’t believe his eyes. A long pause followed in which he waited to see if the apparition would vanish, and only when he could accept that Obi-Wan was really there did he blurt out, “Master?”

Obi-Wan, thankfully free from any kind of wound that Anakin could see, breathed a sigh of relief and walked forward. Anakin made to move out of his way, assuming he was trying to get past him and out of the dark, bare tunnel that lay behind the door, but Obi-Wan reached out lightning-quick and grabbed his wrist. To Anakin’s amazement, he then yanked him into his arms and wrapped them around him tightly.

“Padawan, what were you thinking!?” he hissed. “Do you have any idea how worried I was when I woke up and found you gone? You could have been killed out there!”

Stunned, Anakin brought his own arms up to Obi-Wan’s shoulders – as much to check again that he was real as to return the embrace. It had been such a long time since Obi-Wan had put his arms around him like this. It just wasn’t like him.

_He must really have been worried about me_ , thought Anakin.

It wasn’t that he’d never thought that before: he’d seen the worry in Obi-Wan’s eyes many times, and heard the genuine concern in his voice, but Obi-Wan hadn’t embraced him properly like this since his knighting ceremony.

And Obi-Wan had never clung onto him with such intensity, not even while trying to keep him from freezing to death on Yrinst. Now his arms seemed to be touching as much of Anakin as he possibly could – digging in the tips of his fingers – like Anakin belonged to him entirely and he was never going to let go.

_… let go of your attachments._

_He’s sensed it too_ , Anakin thought. _He knows that if I do bring balance to the Force, it will cost me my life._

_So be it._

_But let it happen without him having the chance to learn what happened that night on Tatooine._

_Let him never find that out._

“… Master,” he said weakly. Obi-Wan drew back.

“Unbelievable. You didn’t even _try_ to leave me a message telling me where you were going!”

“I… I’m sorry, Master, but I thought you were in trouble and I had to try and find something in the centre that would help you! I didn’t expect to run into Vader in quite the way I did…”

“Vader?” exclaimed Obi-Wan. “He’s here too, then?” Anakin nodded. With a groan, Obi-Wan continued, “Anakin, Vader is dangerous – you cannot be wandering around alone where he could hurt you – or worse!”

Something in Anakin’s face must have given away, even as he tried to reconcile Obi-Wan’s… uncharacteristic emotional display with the Master he knew, because Obi-Wan went still and quiet, as he’d done back at the side of the lake, and asked quietly –

“What did he do to you?”

Still struggling for words, Anakin fumbled for long moments before stammering, “I… he… it was nothing, Master: he threw me through a window and then he just left.”

Obi-Wan took a deep breath. “A window,” he said flatly.

“I put bacta on it,” Anakin assured him – and really, Obi-Wan should have been able to tell that because Anakin was still drenched in the stuff, “It’s fine, really – I’m just… so glad to see you’re alive, Master. With Vader running around I feared the worst. And there was another, much stronger monster – experiment, rather – in the Med Centre, but I dealt with it, and Luke – “

“You found Luke?”

“I did, but we got separated again. He was okay last I saw him, though.”

“It doesn’t matter, Anakin, that boy is not important – you are.”

Anakin blinked.

_What?_

“I don’t want you to go anywhere without me from now on, Anakin. You are my Padawan, it is my duty to look after you – and it’s clear you’re not looking after yourself!”

A new foreboding sank into Anakin’s thoughts, like a rock in a deep, dark well.

“ _Knight_ , Master. I’m a Knight. You can’t treat me like – “

Obi-Wan reached toward him again, but this time his hands cupped Anakin’s face instead of his shoulders and Anakin froze, staring into the familiar blue eyes on level with his own, the dark pupils stretching towards the edges of the blue. He put his own hands on Obi-Wan’s wrists but didn’t try to yank them away just yet.

“You will always be my Padawan,” Obi-Wan told him. “And I your Master.”

One warm hand slid down Anakin’s cheek.

“… my dear boy.”

The eyes began to move closer, as Obi-Wan leaned in. Anakin should have known he had nothing to fear, yet he recoiled, but he did so in vain because Obi-Wan surged forward and then –

…

_“You know that even after you become a Knight, even if Master Kenobi did begin to see you as more than a student, the Jedi Order forbids all such relationships between masters and apprentices – former or current.”_

_“But Obi-Wan is good. He’s so good. And he’s so wise too – it’s like he knows everything. I know that everything he’d do for me would always be in my best interest, and would never be taking advantage of me!”_

_“Yes. But Anakin, even now you make it sound more like a guardian’s duties towards a child. There is an axis along which you and he can never stand at equal height, because he has been your guardian all these years.”_

_“But… I love him, Chancellor…”_

…

The lips that were pressed against his made the sweltering air around him feel chilled by comparison. Obi-Wan left nothing up to interpretation concerning what kind of kiss this was – he captured Anakin’s mouth and held it helpless to the heat of his skin.

_So warm_ , thought Anakin, as something like fire enveloped him. _Like he has a fever._

_…_

_That’s probably why he’s doing this._

_I’m such an idiot._

Anakin wanted to pull back, but couldn’t. Obi-Wan was putting too much of his strength into this act. But as Anakin’s shock and confusion gave way to the only answer that could ever have made sense, he tried to gather his wits enough to pull away from the embrace: to pull hard enough that it would get through to Obi-Wan that this was not something he actually wanted to do with Anakin.

Yet the fire raged on, and only a brief moment of respite was given when Anakin felt on the verge of passing out from lack of air.

“Master – your head – “

Obi-Wan kissed him again, no less fiercely than before, his hand snaking up to the back of Anakin’s head, tangling his fingers in Anakin’s hair and manipulating him as he would. Anakin felt paralysed, unable to tug his hair out of Obi-Wan’s grip, as he forced Anakin’s head to turn so he could attack his jaw and neck.

“Master,” gasped Anakin. There was no response and he had the feeling he wasn’t being listened to in the slightest, but he had to keep trying. “Master, you hurt your head – you’re not thinking – “

His words were swallowed again, his head pulled back now so Obi-Wan was looming over him.

“Quiet, Padawan,” Obi-Wan told him, soft but firm. He turned Anakin’s head again to whisper in his ear. “I know what you need.”

Anakin still couldn’t believe this was happening. It had to be the head injury, there was simply no other explanation.

But he didn’t know what to do.

“Come here,” Obi-Wan murmured, and then Anakin was being dragged, almost bonelessly, across the aisle to the red altar.

While they moved he had more freedom and he tried to duck out of Obi-Wan’s hold and get in a position from which he could manoeuvre him into a hold of his own, but Obi-Wan’s nimble fingers clenched around the fabric of his tunic and yanked him with a great force towards the raised table.

A heavy impact against Anakin’s back was the first he was aware that he’d been thrown onto the altar. It shocked him enough that he tried to bounce back off it without thinking, but something drew his wrists together, pulled them above his head and pushed them down against the velvet cloth, a heavy weight pressing his chest back down again.

_It’s just the head wound_ , Anakin reminded himself, as he was kissed again. _You saw how bad it was – you have to stop him! Can you imagine how mortified he’ll be when whatever is going wrong in his brain is fixed?_

_How do I stop him without hurting him, though? He’s just kissing me…_

Even as he thought that, things took a drastic turn. Obi-Wan gripped his two wrists together with one hand, somehow, while the other slipped in between his own and Anakin’s bodies. Without any warning he gave Anakin’s cock a firm squeeze through his trousers, making him whimper and squirm.

_Oh, fuck._

Anakin knew about Satine Kryze and had heard rumours about other women his master had liaised with, but as far as he knew there had never been another male in Obi-Wan’s history. However, if he had thought that feeling something he wasn’t used to in a partner might have shocked him out of his current behaviour then he hoped in vain. Obi-Wan eased his grip after a couple of seconds, but did not let go.

Anakin couldn’t remember ever being touched so intimately and so forcefully at the same time. He tried to back away from the hand, but had nowhere to go, and a strange, giddy feeling travelled through him like a wave over a shore. Obi-Wan tightened his grip again, as Anakin finally managed to free his lips by shaking his head wildly from side to side.

“No, too fast,” he gasped out. “Obi – Master, you don’t – ah, you’re going too fast, I – ah, ah!”

Obi-Wan ground his hand down a little harder, and smiled, and Anakin looked up into those blue eyes morphed into an expression he would have liked to say he’d never seen on Obi-Wan before. But he had seen it before – just never aimed at him.

Predatory.

“Master, please – you’ll hurt yourself – your head. You’re not thinking straight!”

But Obi-Wan smiled, now serenely somehow, and leaned in to Anakin’s ear again.

“Why do you say I’m not thinking straight, my dear one? Why shouldn’t I touch you now, like this? Did you think all this time your Master didn’t return your feelings for him?”

_This can’t be real either._

“But you’re so precious, Anakin. Who would not want to keep you for their own? And don’t pretend you’ve never thought about it. Masters know what their sweet little Padawans think about at night, beneath the stars.”

Anakin couldn’t – he couldn’t think of what to say or do. He choked out – “I…no, I…” But Obi-Wan kissed him again, more gently this time, more like he might have in Anakin’s imagination, years ago. Anakin had accepted long before he’d reunited with Padme that Palpatine was right – Obi-Wan would never accept his feelings for him and in truth that was part of what made him so admirable.

He had integrity, unlike some. Yet Anakin had never been able to convince himself that a relationship between them would have been _wrong,_ even after he’d given up on it becoming a reality.

His beard was soft. Anakin had never been kissed by anyone with a beard before. The thought of Obi-Wan knowing even the slightest hint of his (former?) feelings for him had always been mortifying. For his Master to think he was just a stupid little kid. That he couldn’t be a proper Jedi.

And now even though the reaction to knowing of those feeling was not disgust or disappointment, or even rejection, Anakin wanted nothing more in that moment that to curl up in a corner and disappear.

_What will he think of you when he comes back to his senses?_

_He’ll be kind about it, of course._

_But in a way, that will be worse, won’t it?_

Obi-Wan paused again and rested his forehead against Anakin’s, speaking softly, gently against his lips. “I’ve always known, dear one. When you were my Padawan and still so young I dared not corrupt you, nor while the war was on and you had so much else to think about. My poor Anakin. I’ve seen how much pain you’ve been in. I know you’ve thought I was indifferent to it, in your darker moments, but that was never true.”

Anakin had to stop him, now, while his other hand left his clothed cock and travelled up to cup his face again. He had to stop him now.

He just lay there.

“My dear boy. Don’t you see how important you are to me?”

His expression became more intense, and he backed off a small fraction but had no intention of stopping as he took Anakin’s left hand with his right and pulled it down between them. He wasn’t forceful, but Anakin couldn’t bring himself to resist.

“You feel it now, don’t you, my darling?” he put Anakin’s hand on the quite substantial bulge between his legs. “The truth of your master’s feelings for you?”

There had been occasions in the past that Anakin had seen Obi-Wan naked: Jedi were not particularly sensitive about nudity, though some things were considered inappropriate, of course. He knew his Master was well-endowed, and more so than himself, but he had always found that alternately amusing and irritating, neither a turn on nor off.

Now the feel of it beneath his hand, hot and larger than he’d ever seen it under more innocent circumstances seemed to make his brain go blank.

_He’s going to be so disgusted with you when he realises what’s happened._

_How dare you touch him like this while he’s in this condition._

_Is there no depth you won’t sink to?_

As Anakin tried to pull his left hand away Obi-Wan’s grip only grew tighter. Was Obi-Wan stronger than he was? He had thought not but maybe that was only when the Force was involved.

Obi-Wan smirked. “The look on your face, Anakin. You really are quite innocent in some ways, aren’t you? Don’t worry, dear one, you can take it. You’ll take it beautifully.”

He’d what? Anakin wasn’t even sure what Obi-Wan meant. Obi-Wan probably wasn’t even sure what he meant – he probably still had fucking shrapnel in his brain and should never have left the transport! This clusterfuck would have been taxing on even a Jedi Master on his best day – in this situation Obi-Wan should have been able to count on Anakin to look out for him and here he was lying there like a doll letting their relationship fall apart and…

And unable to deny the ministrations had got to him. He didn’t want to look but he could feel his cock swelling with interest. He was the worst. The worst…

“So responsive… I know there are some things that scare you about this, Anakin,” Obi-Wan told him, leaning in to murmur in his ear again. “It’s all right. I should have taken those fears away from you years ago. I am your Master, Anakin, and it’s my responsibility to make you feel safe, and content.”

He kissed Anakin’s lips again, and not knowing what to do about it, Anakin still just let him.

“Once you see that there’s nothing to be afraid of, my dear one, you will no longer suffer from your fear. What could be more worthy of a Jedi Knight?”

With one final kiss to Anakin’s cheek Obi Wan moved down his body, dragging his right arm with him until his head was in front of Anakin’s cock. He pulled all four of their hands to the waistband of Anakin’s trousers and kept Anakin’s wrists in the grip of his right while his left deftly undid Anakin’s belt and pulled down on the cloth.

“M-Master, don’t,” Anakin said weakly. He cursed himself for not being stronger. It was like his body was on fire and he couldn’t move his limbs. He was pathetic.

He was the one at fault.

Obi-Wan kissed him, right at the base of his cock, and he couldn’t do anything – he looked down at the head of hair glowing orange in the fire-like light that permeated this entire building and in his mind he could already see it slipping down to do what he’d seen in those dirty videos – and all that happened was it made his cock twitch and throb.

His own mouth wouldn’t work for him, but the cries inside his head wouldn’t stop.

_No, no, Master – please don’t do that, it’s so disgusting! Mom made me promise not to look at the bad things at The Palace, I didn’t mean to see them – I know I should never do things like that, please don’t make me do it I don’t want to be bad!_

A hot tongue licked him there and he jolted up on the altar, trying to squirm back. Obi-Wan held him in place at his hip but sitting up he saw straight back down the length of the chapel to the door that had been left open, and one last desperate idea to make this stop before it got even worse finally came to him.

“Master… Master, stop – the door is open, what if someone sees?”

Obi-Wan looked up at him, face gentle, eyes dark. He looked behind himself at the open door.

“Shall I go and close it for you, dear one?”

“Please,” breathed Anakin. “Please close it, Master.”

There was a pause, and then Obi-Wan rose up from his crouch and kissed Anakin’s forehead.

“As you wish.”

With that, he let go of Anakin’s wrists.

Anakin took deep breaths like he’d just been pulled out of a swirling whirlpool moments before drowning – still telling himself he was a fucking useless piece of crap for letting it get that far. He re-arranged himself into his clothes and re-did his belt and hoping to keep Obi-Wan on this course, added –

“We shouldn’t… I mean, we shouldn’t anyway, Master – but it’s dangerous in this place. Those monst – experiments, and Vader could be anywhere, he came out of nowhere the last time I saw him. We have to be careful, Master.”

“Of course, you’re quite right,” agreed Obi-Wan.

He returned to Anakin, and Anakin knew he should step out of the way before Obi-Wan reached him, but instead he froze, and let Obi-Wan put his hand on his shoulder one more time.

Because Anakin was a pathetic creature, really, who wanted comfort even from someone who was not in their right mind to give it.

Obi-Wan looked him dead in the eye.

“I will not let him take you from me, Padawan.”

Then he kissed him again, but only briefly, before he went back to close the door.

Anakin didn’t know how to describe Obi-Wan’s voice just then – he had never heard him use that tone. _It wasn’t him_ , he told himself. _Not really – it’s the wound to his head talking._

_But._

_Is it possible for a head wound to entirely invent these kinds of feelings?_

_Or is it just suppressing the Jedi in him?_

_Ridiculous_ , he told himself. _What is Obi-Wan without ‘the Jedi in him’?_

As the door swished close he searched for something to keep Obi-Wan’s mind off what he had been trying to do before, and fortunately his eyes found the other open door – the one Obi-Wan had run in from.

“What’s through there, Master?” he asked him.

With faint interest, Obi-Wan looked to the door with the keypad lock.

“There’s nothing down there, I’m afraid,” he said. “Just a stairway to a door with a combination lock for which I do not possess the combination.” He smiled a more ‘Obi-Wan’ like smile, and Anakin breathed a little easier.

“What about that door. Maybe they use the same combination?”

“Three-zero-two-five?” asked Obi-Wan. “Afraid not. It’s not exactly the same kind of animal, unfortunately. Though perhaps you’d have better luck with it than I did, Padawan. You are most gifted in these areas.”

“Knight, Master,” said Anakin weakly. _Should have called him ‘Obi-Wan’, not ‘Master’._

Obi-Wan chuckled. “Of course. Right, well, we’d better keep going. With the Sith Master on the loose your young friend might be in serious trouble without our help.”

Anakin breathed out.

“I don’t know about that, Master. If you ask me, Luke seems to be the luckiest kid in the galaxy.” Then, because he was already worried about how suspicious Obi-Wan was of Luke, “I believe he has been truly blessed by the Force,”

“Interesting, that,” Obi-Wan remarked neutrally.

When they were back at the threshold of the door with the keypad, Obi-Wan stopped suddenly and turned to Anakin. For a moment Anakin – only just beginning to calm down again – was worried he was going to do something weird – or worse, collapse like he had back at the clinic.

Instead, Obi-Wan spoke in a calm and level tone.

“I’m sorry about what happened back there, Anakin. I don’t know what came over me.”

Anakin’s mouth opened before he could think of a response, and he fumbled over one like an idiot.

_Thank the Force. Thank you, thank you, thank you._

“I – no, you uh – it’s your head, Obi-Wan. It got banged up pretty bad – you shouldn’t be out here.”

“Well, I’m certainly not leaving you alone,” Obi-Wan assured him. “But Anakin, we can discuss what happened when we’re safe.”

_We can…_

“Let’s see if we can’t open that basement door.”

“This is the basement,” Anakin pointed out.

“The basement’s basement, then,” said Obi-Wan. “Come along, Padawan.”

_The head injury must be regressing his mind somehow – Obi-Wan hasn’t treated me this much like a Padawan since I was one. It’s probably what’s making him confuse me with… whoever he actually has or had those sorts of feelings for._

Beyond the threshold of the keypad-door, a metal tunnel with poorer light than the rest of this building stretched out about twelve metres before a staircase. The two Jedi walked briskly across the grated flooring with Obi-Wan slightly out in front and Anakin doing his best to shove everything that had just happened away, out of his mind so he could concentrate on making sure they got out of here. If there was another riddle for him to solve, he wanted his mind to be entirely focused on it.

When they made their way down the stairs to the door at the bottom, Anakin felt that dark feeling well up almost like a dam had burst. He saw at once what Obi-Wan meant by the lock being different, and unfortunately saw at once what the answer to this particular riddle was.

The lock was a three by three grid, but instead of digits 1-9 each key simply had a gold star upon it. However, the keys were set out as a table, with a strip of metal running along its top and left side, inscribed with values that divided the stars into rows and columns.

The columns lay under the values A, B, and C. The rows next to ‘Q1’, ‘Q2’ and ‘Q3’.

Question one, question two, and question three.

This was ‘What’s in the Box?’ then.

“Anakin?” Obi-Wan asked. “You look like you have an idea.”

“… Yeah.”

“Some mysterious clue hidden around the building, no doubt,” said Obi-Wan dryly. “Is there a problem?”

Anakin shook his head – what else could he do? “No.”

First question: how had Dooku been killed? Easy enough for the man who killed him to answer – dismembered then decapitated with a lightsaber, the second of the three options that had been presented to him. He pushed the middle key in the top row and it lit up blue, with a little, cheerful note.

He paused, and Obi-Wan looked towards him. “So far, so good,” he commented.

The next question hadn’t been quite so straight forward. His first instinct was to say the answer was ‘Zeall and Phanti’, except that the presenter wanted to know who had taken over from the original two who founded Silent Hill, and Anakin had thought _that_ had been Zeall and Phanti.

He didn’t know for sure though. Perhaps Oloré and Caden had founded Silent Hill and Zeall and Phanti were their children? But no, Caden had written of ‘Felis’ making the book for him as a child and ‘Felis’ had been – presumably – a young man when Zeall had been in charge, with two women fighting over him.

Presumably. He didn’t know.

If Silent Hill really had been founded over a thousand years ago then the answer couldn’t involve Vader, since Vader was still around now, and no species of Vader’s body-type that Anakin knew of lived anywhere near that long.

On the other hand, the presenter had said the original two had been betrayed and killed by their children. Caden expected to be killed by Oloré, who was not his child. And while there was no proof she was Zeall’s, the feeling Anakin had about it…

Recklessly, he went ahead and pushed the middle button on the middle row. Oloré and Caden. As he did it he remembered that Joss’ diary had spoken of Phanti having a daughter, not a son, and he worried that meant he’d gotten it wrong somehow, but to his relief the button lit up the same blue as the one above it, with the same tone.

“Well done, Padawan,” said Obi-Wan. Anakin exhaled.

But now, it was the third question. Who was the perpetrator of the massacre.

_Obi-Wan won’t know,_ he tried to tell himself. _All he knows it that you’re pushing one out of the three keys in that row. He wasn’t with you when the questions were asked. There’s no way he could know._

Anakin would still be admitting what he’d done in front of him though.

_You have to. How the hell else are you going to get out of here!?_

“Anakin?” Obi-Wan asked curiously.

_He’ll know. As soon as I push that button, he’ll know. I can’t do it!_

“It’s all right, Anakin. I will do everything in my power to protect you, you know that.”

Obi-Wan put his hand on Anakin’s back and stroked gently up and down. Anakin didn’t even think about how unlike him it was to do so, he just reached up towards the keypad.

C: Anakin Skywalker.

The button in the bottom-right corner. He hovered over it for a moment before Obi-Wan lifted his hand into Anakin’s messy hair and ran his fingertips through it. Closing his eyes, Anakin pushed.

The key lit up blue, and played the note.

“Good boy,” said Obi-Wan. “That’s my good boy.”

With a loud click, the lock swung open, and Anakin pulled down the latch behind it and opened the door.

_Probably could have smashed the damn thing apart with the wrench_ , he thought to himself bitterly. _This place is driving me crazy._

Beyond this door was another, better lit tunnel with no remarkable features whatsoever. Anakin glanced behind him at the stairs leading back to the Altar Room and hoped he’d never have to walk back up them again. He stepped into the grey hallway after Obi-Wan, who observed the new location with mild interest.

“Almost like a corridor in a Republic battle cruiser,” he said nonchalantly.

He was right – though there were no terminals, and the lights were dim these much sleeker walls did remind him of a cruiser. There was even a slight hum beneath his feet, as though from an engine. Another generator?

The corridor went on for about twenty metres before turning right, and then right again, and at another twenty-metre interval Anakin could see a left turn up ahead. There was nothing else in the corridor – the one thing that made it different from the one before was that there was a transparent window running along it at about head height, but he could see nothing beyond it but another plain corridor.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” Anakin muttered.

Obi-Wan looked back at him, and grinned. “As I said, my dear, I will protect you from all those who would seek to harm you.”

“I’m not scared,” Anakin groaned, rolling his eyes.

It wasn’t exactly a lie, since it wasn’t the thought of their being attacked that scared him. He almost would have welcomed a few skinless dogs at this point, to keep his mind in the moment.

“It’s all right if you are,” Obi-Wan told him. “I could never think less of you for it.”

_It’s not all right, though_ , thought Anakin. _There is no emotion. There is no fear, otherwise there is no peace._

It made his stomach turn, in fact, to think that Obi-Wan would ever say something to the contrary, even with his head as damaged as it was.

“Well, I should be the one protecting you,” he said, as they turned the corner into another short stretch that turned left again after a couple of metres. “You’re the one who was hurt. I’d hope you could rely on me for that, Master.”

Again, Obi-Wan looked back and smirked.

“All right, dear one,” he chuckled. “The circle is now complete, I suppose.”

They walked onto another twenty-metre length of corridor, the ill feeling inside of Anakin growing stronger. Something about those words… it was almost like Obi-Wan was mocking him, but he didn’t know how that could be. What was it about that specific turn of phrase…

“Do you know where we are, Master?” he asked, the question coming to him suddenly. “In Silent Hill, I mean. I was out when they moved me from the Med Centre basement – when Luke moved me, I think.”

They turned another corner, around another bend of this zig-zag path to another, identical corridor.

“Goodness, Anakin, what are you talking about?” Obi-Wan asked with a laugh. “This _is_ the Med Centre basement.”

_… what?_

In some ways he’d been waiting to hear those words. Even then, it didn’t make any sense.

“But… Master, the walls – the lighting, the whole place – “

“Listen closely, Anakin,” Obi-Wan told him. “You can hear someone on a respirator even now.”

And he could.

In-out.

In-out.

In-out.

The same breathing as…

At once, he looked back through the window, at the place where they’d come in.

At the figure in black walking along the same path they had.

Anakin didn’t think.

“Master, run!”

After looking in the same direction, Obi-Wan drew up – and for a moment Anakin feared he saw something like pure _hatred_ in his master’s beautiful eyes. He grabbed Obi-Wan’s wrist and began running, along the only path that was open for them to take.

The window on the next stretch of corridor back towards them was taller; gave them a better view of the black shadow following in their footsteps.

Vader.

Anakin wanted to face him, but the idea of doing so here, with an Obi-Wan not in his right mind and a battleground with even less manoeuvrability than what he’d had in the apartment block stayed him. Not fear of Vader. He wasn’t afraid of Vader. He wouldn’t allow himself to be.

In-out.

In-out.

Vader was picking up the pace. Anakin doubted the rifle was going to have any effect on him so when he reached the end of the next corridor he yelled – “Go on ahead!” to Obi-Wan and turned back, drawing his lightsaber.

But when he pressed the on-switch, the blade didn’t flicker even for an instant. Nothing happened at all.

Darth Vader came around the corner, the black chasms over his eyes completely dead, cape sweeping out behind him. The Force moved around Anakin sharply – Vader trying to grab him as he had back on the roof and pull him towards him, but Anakin was able to negate this move with his own, brief grasp on the Force. Barely. It faded out of his perception almost before he’d slipped out of Vader’s attempt to hold him.

Anakin grit his teeth and ran on – even he wasn’t so reckless as to face a Sith Lord without a lightsaber. Not yet, anyway. Obi-Wan had hung back, and Anakin pushed him forward. “Move! There’s no way we can fight him down here!”

After that they just ran. Vader did not run, Anakin didn’t know if he was capable of it with his armour weighing as heavily on him as it seemed to, yet somehow around every corner they turned he was gaining on them.

His approach had an air of inevitability in it – like a dream where no matter how hard Anakin ran, he always stayed exactly in the same place.

Then he began to feel Vader reaching out in the Force. It was difficult, because Vader’s own Force-presence seemed to turn into a vacuum as soon as Anakin tried to feel it, even though he couldn’t not feel it while Vader was present, like something was cancelling itself out in an endless feedback loop he couldn’t escape from.

Finally, just when he was starting to feeling the vibrations on the floor from each of Vader’s heavy steps, he and Obi-Wan turned the last corner onto a wider, longer corridor that ended with the heavy blast doors of another elevator, just as they were slowly shutting.

“Hurry!” Anakin yelled.

He put all his effort into running to the car before the doors closed. He couldn’t tell how far behind them Vader was as he ran, he just ran, and willed to the Force that Obi-Wan was doing the same. The blast doors were slow, but would they be slow enough?

For Anakin, yes. He ducked his head under the top door and hopped over the bottom to get back into the car – the same one from before, covered in handprints. He reached through the gap to pull Obi-Wan through too – only a step behind him he had to be able to make it too –

Then Vader surged everywhere in the Force, like an explosion, a volcano.

Anakin was thrown back against the opposite wall of the car and Obi-Wan froze, stuck, held in place by Vader in the Force. Anakin leapt to his feet and scrambled desperately for Obi-Wan’s hand and a grip on the doors in the Force, to pull him through and keep them open wide enough that he could be.

But his ability in the Force was fading in and out like a broken transmission, and though he grabbed Obi-Wan’s hand tightly, he couldn’t pull him out of Vader’s grip.

“Master!”

The lights were flickering. There was an intense pain in Anakin’s head but for the moment he didn’t care, he just kept pushing, and pulling, with every last bit of strength he could gather.

“Anakin,” Obi-Wan gasped out. Vader must have been restricting his airway on top of everything – and fuck, that was the last thing Obi-Wan needed right now, for fuck’s sake!

“Master, hold on!”

“Anakin… run.”

He met Obi-Wan’s eyes dead on, and something snapped.

Obi-Wan went flying back down the corridor, straight to where Vader was standing with his arm outstretched. His red saber lit up the entire corridor.

“Master!” Anakin screamed. “Obi-Wan!”

Another pulse in the Force pushed him back to the far end of the car. Once he had climbed to his feet again he wouldn’t have been able to get even his hand through the thin gap in the door.

_No. No, no, no, no, no!_

The doors closed.

But not before Anakin saw Vader’s blade sweep out at Obi-Wan and slice right through the centre of him, cutting him in half.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wellp, I guess Obi-Wan's dead now!
> 
> See you all next week! :D


	13. Eruption

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, my dear friends! Well, let's celebrate getting roughly halfway through the story and over 100k by NOT bisecting any characters this chapter!
> 
> In this chapter, Anakin finally gets out of the Med Centre and runs around the streets of Silent Hill for a while in what I'd say was full-on angst mode, except that I know just how far this story is going to go, and at this point he's only at like, 75-80% angst, maybe?
> 
> Thank you, everyone, for not killing me after that last chapter and for all your support, kudos, time and attention. I'm especially grateful for your comments, and hearing your thoughts on the work.
> 
> Enjoy!
> 
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Anakin screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

The elevator began to rise. Even though the doors were shut and the Force was abruptly silent, Anakin threw himself against them over and over.

This was not how it was supposed to happen.

He raked the nails of both hands down the groove where the doors met – breaking those on the left and leaving hideous, tear-track scratches in the metal with the right as he tried to pry the doors open

This couldn’t be how it happened.

When the doors wouldn’t open and the car kept rising he banged his fist against the control panel over and over, and then just kept hitting it. Plastic pieces of buttons pinged against the floor but nothing happened.

So Anakin just kept throwing himself against the walls.

This was not fair.

Screaming.

“No. No! No! No! No! NO!”

It was just like that night on Tatooine.

_I guess you got your wish then,_ a little voice inside his head snickered. _He’s never going to find out about that now._

The lights in the elevator went dark to the wail of the sirens.

*~*~*~*

Anakin opened his eyes still inside the elevator, on the floor, curled up and blinking in the darkness.

Had it been a dream?

He reached for the flashlight he’d kept clipped to his chest since he got here, flicking the on switch. The grey walls of the car lit up – covered in horrible scratches over every wall. Anakin held his hands up to the light. The nails of his left hand were torn and bloody. On his right, tiny scraps of greyish metal gathered at the tips.

No, it hadn’t been a dream.

Obi-Wan was…

_DING!_

The elevator doors opened, out into a dark corridor stained with black trails on the walls. The Silent Hill Med Centre.

_But… I was just in that other building, wasn’t I?_

The building with the same layout as the Med Centre that had looked more like an industrial mining station – filled with the same disgusting Sith experiments as the Med Centre but how could it have been the same building when everything about it looked different?

_Well, what the fuck does that matter now, you worthless fool?_

Anakin sat on his knees in the elevator with his head down and didn’t move. He didn’t know what to do now. He didn’t know that there was anything _to_ do. It had seemed up until now that the presence of Vader or something else stronger than those weaker creatures was able to bring the Force back to him, but that time the Force had just stuttered in and out, and Anakin had stood by completely useless, while Obi-Wan…

No. No, he refused to accept it. _No._

There was a crackle of static, and in his confused state Anakin jumped before he realised it wasn’t coming from his communicator. The PA system – had that all been real?

There was a loud click.

_“Would Anakin Skywalker please proceed to the front desk?”_

This voice was a woman’s: clipped and professional.

_“That’s Anakin Skywalker to the front desk at the earliest convenience – there is a package waiting for him to pick up. Thank you.”_

Then there was a second click, and the building went quiet again.

There was...

There was a package for him.

What?

_Vader,_ a voice told him. _It’s Vader mocking you, because you’re a disgusting, pathetic little worm who ran away, like the vermin you’d find in broken machines, when his Master needed him._

_You were the Chosen One! You were meant to destroy the Sith!_

_But really you’re just a coward, aren’t you?_

_And Obi-Wan…_

Anakin stumbled to his feet, despite everything. He wasn’t sure if he could pinpoint why – perhaps whatever package Vader had left for him was going to go some way to explaining what had happened, making sense of what had happened, and even if that was a stupid thing to think he really couldn’t… think of anything better.

Step after shaky step he made his way out into the hall, past the staircase that was ‘out of order’, toward the door back into the main reception. He opened the door. He walked through the door.

He was back in the Med Centre reception. Enough time had passed that there was no longer any light coming in through the boarded windows, and Anakin’s eyes fell on the door back out into Silent Hill. How was he supposed to leave now after what had happened? Was he just going to go back to the transport and let Jesse know what had happened?

Jesse…

That was right. He had to get back to the transport for Jesse’s sake. He couldn’t just leave him up there all alone.

Vader was out there. Maul was out there.

(Anakin would kill them both)

Luke… last he’d seen Luke he was alive too. Still running around looking for his father. Anakin had to find him too – a Jedi Knight couldn’t just leave an untrained Padawan running around this nightmare.

And he needed the parts too. Hyperfuel and zirconia. Otherwise they couldn’t make it into space at all.

He didn’t really want to try for just another part of the planet anymore. If the locals were deliberately keeping quiet about housing a Sith base on their world, Anakin was honestly afraid of what he might do to them.

Obi-Wan wouldn’t want him to do something like that.

Wearily he walked stilted steps to the front desk at the reception, glancing around the rubble and burned papers that had collected there. Among the debris was a pristine, light blue bit of paper glued into a wallet-shape – an ‘envelope’. He found a small gap along the fold and holding it gingerly – his left fingertips were beginning to sting from how he’d abused them earlier – he ripped the paper open.

There was another paper inside, not nearly so pristine, with a map on one side that Anakin recognised as that of Silent Hill, stained with blood and with an area on the south shore of the lake ringed in red. The paper was brittle with age and dotted with brown stains. On the other side was a hand-written note.

_I buried the rest of her at his feet, where she’d lived her entire life. She is in a glass, in a box, in a bed there. I had hoped flowers would grow on her, like the flowers we used to put in our hair when we were children, but nothing does._

_This place has been corrupted beyond all salvation. I should have thrown that thing into the lake._

_Anakin,_

Anakin blinked and read the start of that line again, expecting to realise he’d only imagined his name being on it. But it was there – this note that must have been written years ago was addressed directly to him.

_Anakin, if you wish to help Luke find his father, you’ll only find what you need at the Research Station. But I beg you – do not go there. The father will not survive without the son, and that can only be for the best._

_The choice is up to you. I only know I wouldn’t wish your fate on my worst enemy._

_I pray that you will find peace someday._

_M_

Anakin leant against the reception desk, trying to gather his thoughts. ‘M’ stuck out for him the most, in the Basic alphabet the character could have referred to a trillion people, but the one that first came to mind as actually being in this town with him was Maul. However, he somehow doubted Maul would be praying for him to find peace – unless it was in the sense that Maul was praying for his death. Then again, the guy _was_ insane.

_He’s going to be pissed he’ll never get to kill me in front of Obi-Wan now_.

Maul. Whether he wrote the note or not, the next time Anakin saw him he was going to get some answers. Everything he knew about ‘Silent Hill’, and Darth Vader.

No matter if Anakin had to rip the answers out of him piece by piece, he was getting them.

Turning the paper back over again to look at the map, Anakin found himself frowning. The red circle, from what he could tell, was ringed around the area he’d filled his canteen in yesterday. There was nothing there that he could remember that might help him now.

But then, what could have ever helped him now? When a Master died, a Padawan had to carry on on their own.

_What are you thinking? You’re not a Padawan, you idiot. You haven’t been one for years. And weren’t you always complaining when Obi-Wan still treated you like one? Useless…_

The paper was beginning to flutter in his hands. It was fluttering because Anakin was trembling. He really was useless. Why had they thought he might be the Chosen One, again?

_There is no death_ , Obi-Wan would have told him, had he been there. _There is the Force. Do you not remember the very first thing I taught you?_

_But I can’t feel the Force, Master_ , Anakin thought. _So maybe here there is death after all._

If so, then Obi-Wan was dead.

There. He admitted it.

Obi-Wan was dead. He’d seen him die with his own eyes. Vader – that awful red blade – Maul may have been able to survive similar damage but Maul was a zabrak, and more significantly a Sith, with access to Dark powers Anakin shouldn’t have wanted to know about now.

Obi-Wan was dead. Anakin would never see him again, and now couldn’t even feel the Force he’d become a part of, when he might have hoped against hope that as a powerful Force-user he might at least be able to sense whatever remained of him after he was gone, unlike his mother, who was nothing but dust in the cosmos now, so far as he could tell in the Force.

More likely he’d know nothing of Obi-Wan now until the day he too joined the Force. And it wasn’t like that would bring them back together either, for there would be no ‘them’, according to Jedi belief.

For the last fourteen years Obi-Wan had always been there – even when they’d been fighting on separate battlefields he’d always known they were fighting for the same thing at the same time, and sometimes that had been more than enough. Obi-Wan was the only one who had been so close to him since he’d left his mother. Someone who had seemed like they’d always be there no matter what. Even that… _mindfuck_ that had been the Rako Hardeen affair, had only seemed to confirm Obi-Wan’s infallibility all the more, and at that time he’d had the motivation to at least try to be the proper Jedi for Ahsoka’s sake.

Now he was alone. Maybe not in the whole galaxy, but here, now, he was alone. Obi-Wan was gone.

Forever.

_..._

_Then again, weren’t you just thinking about how destroying the Sith would probably be the death of you too?_

_Haven’t you always thought that?_

_So why bother fearing a life without Obi-Wan?_

_It’ll probably be a couple of days at most._

_After everything he went through, can you not even last that long?_

_…_

_…_

_… I didn’t get to say goodbye._

The complaint sounded too pathetic, even in his own head. Even if every single part of him felt like it was impossible to move forward, he had to move forward. He _was_ the Chosen One. There were other people out there who needed him.

He folded the note back into the envelope and tucked it into one of his sleeves. The small park by the lake. On second reading he didn’t really understand what he was looking for there, but what could he do but follow the breadcrumbs? Try to find Maul and the stolen key to the Research Station?

Where would he even begin to look? The note said ‘go here to find Luke’s father’, more or less. Maybe Luke’s father knew something about Vader. Knew something that Anakin could use to destroy him.

Destroy Vader…

… yes, that was what he’d do. Destroy Vader.

Anakin began walking towards the door. Every step felt like he was treading on that ice that had frozen the sea on Yrinst. Obi-Wan wasn’t going to save him this time.

One foot in front of the other, and he eventually reached the main entrance.

_Is this it?_

_After all that, am I just going to walk out the door?_

The fingers on his right hand closed around the bar that pushed down to exit, and he leant his weight against it. It was open, unlocked just as he’d left it. He moved ever slower as he started to push it open – like if he left the building it would be admitting that he’d really seen Obi-Wan killed in front of him and been unable to save him.

And it wasn’t that he came to any kind of resolution in his head about that, but his arm was still pushing on that door, inch by inch.

… a wave of burning air hit him in the face. His eyes shut instinctively, and as the intense heat refused to pass he struggled to open them again. When he breathed in, the air smelled of ash and sulphur.

What the hell?

He walked over the threshold into the dark night beyond. None of the street lamps, in this area at least, were lit. But neither was it pitch black. He struggled to adjust his eyes to the air outside, just about able to judge where the light was coming from and turning towards it. A glowing, orange light. Familiar.

Blinking, he dragged his hand away from his eyes. There was no fog left in the town, so he was able to see all the way back to the mountains to the south.

One of the mountains was on fire.

He found himself staring, incredulously, up at a landscape entirely different to what had been there yesterday. The mountain looked black, surrounded by oppressive clouds of smoke that reflected some of the entrancing light that flickered at the tip of the mountain like a candlelight. Luminous streaks of lava ran down the side in a channel that was headed right for the town. 

_Impossible,_ thought Anakin, feeling the whirlpool inside him starting to pull at the inside of his skin. _How could we not have noticed… an active volcano, on the brink of eruption?!_

This was completely insane. He stumbled down the steps to the Med Centre’s main entrance, toward the front gate and out onto the street – and could barely believe what he was seeing.

There was _lava_ in the road. A small stream, oozing slowly, and cooling into a black, bulbous solid about a hundred yards down, but it was actual lava – and he was sure if he went any further south he’d start to find it very difficult to get around. A problem, because that was the direction the road back to the transport was in, and –

Oh, Force. _The transport._

Anakin fumbled for the communicator at once, choking on air that was probably toxic as he coughed into it –

“Jesse!? Jesse, are you there? Come in, over!”

_He’s dead_ , Anakin thought. _They’re all dead – I was supposed to save them and I let them down._

There was a long pause, broken by intermittent crackles of static.

“… – kywalker… hear me, over?”

Anakin hooked his fingers into the chain-link fence, ignoring the pain around the nails, and let himself sag against it.

“Jesse, thank the Force,” he exhaled. “Jesse, listen – I was… I was out for I don’t know how long, I just made it out of the Med Centre, and now I’m looking at an erupting volcano.” He coughed, the deep breaths he was taking pulling in who knew what kind of horrible fumes. “Jesse, are you all right – are you safe?”

“No, sir,” said Jesse brightly, “I was burned to death by the lava and am speaking to you from beyond the grave.”

Despite everything, Anakin barked out a short laugh.

“We’re all right here,” Jesse assured him. “The lava all seems to be headed in the direction of the town, but I had a feeling you’d pull through, sir. You always do.”

“Yeah,” said Anakin. “Well, let’s hope there aren’t any aftershocks. Honestly, I can’t believe it, a kriffing volcano… Jesse, look – no waiting around now, if you get that thing airworthy you take her out of the region, you hear me?”

“Good soldiers follow orders,” said Jesse. Anakin’s head swam and for a few moments everything sounded distant and muffled. Then, “What about General Kenobi?”

Anakin felt like he’d frozen, but his mouth moved, and sounds came out.

“He didn’t make it.”

There was a brief pause.

“… I’m sorry to hear that, sir.”

Down the street, a lump of glowing lava rolled down a trail that had cooled earlier and, solidifying, tumbled over the edge of where that trail ended before stopping – extending the line by a few inches.

_Is that all he’s going to say?_ Anakin wondered.

_Well, what do you want him to say, you idiot? What else is there for him to say?_

_It’s not his world that’s falling apart._

Anakin took a deep breath.

“It was the Sith Master,” he said. “That’s why I’m staying here now, no matter what happens.”

“I thought you might be, this time,” Jesse said. “What about that civilian, sir – he still alive and kicking?”

“As far as I know.” Anakin glanced up the side of the dark mountain. “I don’t know if he’ll be able to get to you with the volcano now, though. You might have to send help.”

“It would be nice, wouldn’t it,” agreed Jesse. “To be helped, when you really needed it?”

Anakin wondered if he’d heard that wrong.

“… Jesse?”

“Not to worry, sir – I’m a clone and you’re my Jedi: I will live and die by your command and like it, no doubt.”

“Jesse, is there something wrong?”

Anakin wasn’t sure what was happening right now. It might have all been a bad dream.

The light from the lava seemed to lessen moment by moment.

“Oh, I’m pretty sure there is, sir, but I don’t think it’s right of me to worry you about it. You have the galaxy on your shoulders, don’t you? I know I’m not worth listening to.”

“Jess…”

“I’ll let you get back to your duties, sir. I’m sure we’ll check in with each other again.”

“Jesse, wait – you’re not making any sense – “

“Don’t worry, sir. I’m a good soldier, and good soldiers follow orders.”

“Jesse!”

As he cried out there was another burst of white noise in his head, louder this time. It swelled up until he could feel the pressure against every part of his skull, and he found himself squeezing his eyes shut, hanging onto the fence as his knees buckled and his body swung forwards.

_Those words… that one phrase… why does it cause so much pain?_

There was no time to consider why. As soon as the pressure eased off he could hear static, and not only the static of a bad connection either. The sound of a burning instrument was beneath that noise. Anakin forced himself to look up.

A hand – tiny, child-sized, covered in burning hot lava – reached out of the smoking mess that was headed up the street. Something, something dripping with glowing orange, something pulled itself up out of the lava and dragged itself forward. It was vaguely in the shape of a humanoid child – except that even with the lava coating it, it was obvious a quarter or so of the thing’s head had been sliced out.

Anakin watched, unable to turn his eyes away, as the thing slumped forward and the lava cooled off dark and immobile, a dark rock roughly in the form of a mutilated child.

He turned and ran.

After seeing that, it was almost a relief when a green light flew past his face, and a sphere-headed droid covered in blood and crystals staggered out of the darkness.

*~*~*~*~*~*

The Sith experiments appeared to be more active at night. They came thick and fast during the short journey from the Med Centre back to the little park on the lake: dogs, droids, painted suits – the whole grotesque crew outside of Darth Vader himself.

Anakin found them little trouble at this point.

In fact, he was grateful for something to keep his mind on, because he couldn’t think about Obi-Wan, and now the matter with Jesse was becoming ever more urgent.

_This place might be affecting him too, somehow_ , Anakin thought. _Obi-Wan was acting off before, there’s Force knows what kind of Sith madness in the air – no reason it couldn’t be making Jesse… weird._

Unfortunately, with a river of lava blocking off the route back to the transport, there was no way Anakin could get to him. All he could do was pray to the Force that he would survive until Anakin came back.

In the meantime, he bashed another skinless dog’s head open with his wrench. It saved him using up more of the charge on his ranged weapons.

Up ahead, the park that had been there before was gone.

This, along with everything else, seemed to make no sense. It wasn’t just that the drab, depressing foliage from before had been cleared away; the beds looked like they’d actually been paved over with asphalt. This wasn’t impossible to achieve in a day by any means, but he didn’t understand _why_. It made him think of the Med Centre and the other place: had that actually been the Med Centre too?

It wasn’t… entirely impossible, that there could be some sort of mechanism that changed the entire look of a building automatically. He had been unconscious after his fight with the red parasite, and he never did get into the mainframe.

It was just so convoluted. And even though it seemed the answer had to be convoluted in order to make sense, Anakin couldn’t help but feel, given what he was looking at right now, that it was actually simply that this place didn’t make any sense.

The Sith had done something here. Something even the Sith thought was wrong.

The most apparent new addition to the park in place of anything living was a statue of a man, carved to scale and lifted onto an ornate, golden pedestal. The statue too was plated gold, and reflected the glow from the lava on the mountain eerily. Anakin was instantly reminded of the gold metal disc he’d found in the apartment block, the one with the embossed figure labelled ‘The Father’. This figure, if he wasn’t mistaken, was wearing the same kind of robes, and bore the same cruel sneer on his face.

A label on the pedestal proclaimed him:

**DARTH ZEALL**

_Vader must be a fan_ , thought Anakin, _if he’s decided to bring your statue out now._

Reminding himself that there was no point in trying to ‘kill’ a statue, however much he hated its face, Anakin refrained from taking his wrench out and knelt down to read a smaller inscription.

_May our Father watch over this town and protect it from the sinners_

Anakin looked up into Zeall’s odious visage again, and wondered what whoever had put that inscription there had been smoking when they’d thought he might do something like that.

As he stepped back his boot scratched against a patch of loose soil beneath him and he thought of the note left for him in the Med Centre –

‘I buried the rest of her at his feet’.

Well, this was the location that had been ringed on the map. So, Anakin knelt back down again and started scooping the dirt away with his hands. His nails hurt on his left, but right now he didn’t really care – about that, or that he had no idea what he was expected to find by doing this. Some clue to finding Luke’s missing and supposedly dead father?

That might at least mean he’d find Luke. That was what he was supposed to do, right? He was a Jedi Knight, and Luke was lost in this place, and he was supposed to help him?

_But the last time you saw him, he seemed to be doing better than you were, didn’t he?_

_And you didn’t exactly protect Obi-Wan, did you?_

_Maybe Luke’s better off without you, then._

_Maybe everyone else is too._

Anakin dug into the soil harder, until his arms hurt as much as his fingertips. He hit a metal edge about a foot down into the earth, then scraped away the last little bits until he could lift the box that was revealed out. It was a cube, about seven inches on all sides, with a combination lock that Anakin duly smashed apart with his wrench.

The top half of the box swung open and Anakin looked inside.

The inside of the box looked back.

He wasn’t really surprised when he thought about it. Everything clicked into place. The Research Station required a retinal scan to get in, and ‘M’ had buried ‘the rest of her’ here. ‘M’ must have stood for Miriam, he realised now – and ‘Joss’, who had been a worker at the Research Station and thus would have had access, had ended up decapitated, according to Caden’s notes.

It seemed all Miriam had been able to find of her had been her eye. Grey and bloodshot, preserved in a transparent cube about three inches high, in a box, in a flower bed that grew no flowers at the foot of Darth Zeall’s statue.

It didn’t occur to him to think about how that could have been buried there for what had to have been over a thousand years when the statue hadn’t even been there yesterday. Nor how Miriam could possibly have written him a note, mentioning Luke no less, when she had to have been dead herself for almost as long.

He just stood up and walked down to the edge of the dark water to wash the dirt from his hands off the glass in case it interfered with the scanner.

There was also a moment he considered using some of his by now considerable store of bacta strips on his bloody fingernails. He decided against it, because really what was the point? The wounds were minor, and he doubted an infection was going to do him in – though it would have been hilarious, no doubt, if he was wrong.

Anakin secured the ‘glass eye’ next to the holocron he’d got from Maul and readied his blaster again. The experiments hadn’t bothered him while he was near the statue, but he had little doubt they’d be out in force again when he made the run to the Research Station, as they had the first time.

Fuck. That had only been yesterday. And Obi-Wan had been with him and…

He passed the point where he’d found his Master standing, looking out onto the lake.

_“Anakin?”_

The water was still now – strangely still as though it were almost solid, but unlike the ice he’d once fallen through this lake was dark.

But like last time… was that a tall shape he could see on the horizon?

Had it all really happened?

_“Sometimes I feel like you hate me.”_

_I don’t hate you, Master. I swear I don’t._

But even after everything that had happened, the promise sounded hollow inside his head.

_Who are you trying to convince now? It’s not like he’ll come back if you say it loud enough._

“Just keep going,” he found himself muttering out loud. “Just keep going.”

So, Anakin turned away from the lake and ran on, along the same road he had the day before, now in almost total darkness but for his flashlight and the slight glow from the lava in the distance, since the spread hadn’t reached this far north yet.

The road was also cracked in places it hadn’t been before; probably due to the eruption. Anakin ran past a painted suit – just hanging from nothing, cables dangling in the open air – that was chipped and covered in rust as well as neon lilac and orange paint, again not bothering to waste the charge in his blaster shooting at it when he could avoid them much more easily outside the closed corridors of the Med Centre.

Another one coming towards him from up the road he avoided by swerving towards the other side of the street, where the Leisure Centre was only a block up ahead. He hadn’t seen it in the fog his first time coming down this way but now it was much clearer, and he noticed there’d been a stark alteration to the building.

Despite the danger he stopped for a few seconds. Burned in messy lettering along the Leisure Centre front wall, like it had been drawn on with a lightsaber, read the message:

**DO YOU THINK YOU  
REALLY DESERVE TO BE SAVED?**

_Oh, fuck off_ , thought Anakin – but his eyes lingered, and he saw something on the top line that made him come forward a little. More writing – he wasn’t sure how it had been applied, it looked like it made the wall lighter: some kind of stain remover? On this closer inspection the message actually read:

**DO YOU THINK YOU** and your master  
 **REALLY DESERVE TO BE SAVED?**

Anakin didn’t know if he could have explained it if asked, but he felt this was the one time the message sounded like it might actually have been written by Vader. And it was inexplicable, because Vader had still said nothing to him all this time, so why should he have thought this was the kind of thing he’d have said, as opposed to some of the more morbidly ‘humorous’ messages?

A dog came running toward him out of the darkness, panting, and he unholstered his blaster and blasted it aside, then continued running.

_Whatever_ , he thought. _Whoever left it is just trying to mess with my head. Right now, I don’t see how any additional mess is going to make much of a difference._

He paused for a moment at the top of the street that led down to the chasm he and Obi-Wan had narrowly avoided tumbling into, gaze flickering up to the windows on the third floor to see if Maul was still there. He wasn’t, of course; he’d probably run down to the Research Station with whatever key had been hidden in the Leisure Centre the moment Anakin and Obi-Wan had been out of sight, but down the street there was a distinct light coming from over the edge of the pit. The magma below the surface must have welled up in the hole.

There was a little movement at the edge, just close enough for him to see – a small, glowing hand moving in the smoke, climbing out of the hole.

Anakin shook his head and ran on.

His thoughts returned to the message on the wall despite himself. That lighter bit, that really didn’t make sense to him. What possible reason would there be for Obi-Wan not deserving to be saved? He wasn’t a murderer. He hadn’t even truly broken the code, having been able to let go of his attachment to Satine Kryze when she hadn’t been willing to risk her seat of power for him – or so Anakin had inferred.

He really wished Obi-Wan had felt able to talk to him about that.

_But why would he? You’d be no help. He knew about you and Padme – you know that, right? How you couldn’t make the choice to make the ultimate commitment, either to her or to the Jedi Order, the way he did, when he was your age?_

_That’s a real Jedi, Skywalker. Not a spoilt brat who can’t follow even the most basic tenets of the code._

_The worst thing he probably did was stay behind to help you, when he could have saved himself._

Anakin could see himself in front of the Jedi Council now, called upon to explain this mess – the whole bunch of them sat in stony silence while he choked through his account. The whole bunch except that one, empty seat.

(he wasn’t going to talk about what happened in the chapel. That was the head wound at work, of course, and there was no need to sully Obi-Wan’s reputation by mentioning it)

In his mind it was Mace Windu who was directly in front of him. He saw him like the man was burned into his mind, just the same as he had been that day Qui-Gon had brought him to the temple for the first time: impassive, suspicious, untouchable. He’d narrow his dark eyes as Anakin reached the end of this sordid tale and then he’d look to Master Yoda and Yoda would look to him, and their exchanged look would loudly proclaim: _isn’t this exactly what we were talking about earlier?_

Anakin didn’t know what he thought Master Windu would say to him after that. He probably wouldn’t go further than to imply that he didn’t entirely believe Anakin, and leave it at that.

They’d all be disappointed though, that it was Anakin who came back, and not Obi-Wan. Even the kindest of them. When it came to the council, Obi-Wan had always been the one who believed in him, the one who at least some of the time had been on his side.

_So don’t go back then_ , the dark inside of him suggested. _Once you’ve killed the Sith Master, what’s even the point?_

_No_ , he told himself. _You have to go back and make sure the men are looked after even after the war, remember? You made a promise. And what about Padme? How many assassination attempts is she going to have to foil on her own if you’re not there to protect her?_

He thought of that last transmission they’d had together, before the long stretch of silence. How tired she’d sounded. Like she knew soon enough she was going to have to tell him something that he didn’t want to hear.

_She’s probably better off without you though, isn’t she?_

_She looked hopeful_ , he tried telling himself. _That glimpse I caught of her before the call about Maul’s escape came in. Something has changed, while I was away._

Palpatine would hopefully be able to retire once the Sith Master was dead and the war was over, and the Republic didn’t need to rely on him to get them through this state of emergency. Then he wouldn’t have as many power-hungry madmen trying to kidnap or assassinate him either. Anakin liked to think he’d still want to talk with him now and again though, from whatever estate he’d move to.

_He’d be disappointed, wouldn’t he? If I didn’t come back…_

And Ahsoka. _I promised we’d catch up, after…_

But she had had a look on her face very much like Padme’s when they’d spoken. She probably didn’t want to be around him either.

As for Rex, what was he going to do if Anakin came back without Jesse? Oh, he’d say nothing about it of course, be as professional and respectful as possible, but he’d probably sent Jesse back to the port on Mandalore so he’d be looked after, after Maul had messed around with his head. And yet Anakin had just picked him up without thinking and whisked him off to this nightmare, and Jesse was obviously not doing well.

What the hell was Rex supposed to think of him after that?

_You won’t get a chance to find out,_ he reminded himself. _If the Sith Master doesn’t kill you, Cody will._

_Fair enough._

_But I’d better see if I can’t at least help Luke first._

Anakin saw the small Research Station up ahead – almost allowing himself a thread of hope that because the building was small it would be easy to search and find Luke in – though it still didn’t make sense that all these experiments could have been adequately researched and produced in a station of that size.

The building looked very different in the darkness. The smooth metal reflected the light of Anakin’s flashlight, making it glow like a satellite. Anakin came to a halt outside the battered door, shooting down the droid that had been standing in front of it. When its crystals shattered and the red pooled out Anakin stepped in the blood unwittingly, having not seen it in the dark.

_Were Obi-Wan and I really standing here only yesterday?_

It didn’t matter now. He just had to keep moving forward until he couldn’t move anymore.

Taking the glass cube with the eyeball inside, Anakin walked into the entrance and held the cube up to the scanners. With that same sharp noise from before, the blue lightshow swirled around him, and focused in on the cube before dispersing.

There was a loud click.

_“Worker forty-eight B has been recognised.”_

The heavy durasteel doors slid open, into a pitch-black entrance hall. The same clipped, female voice from before continued.

_“Proceed to your station and wait for instruction. Any delay will be reported to Lord Zeall.”_

Ignoring a dog that tried for one last snap at him, Anakin walked into the Research Station.

*~*~*~*

_“Worker forty-eight B has been declared ‘tardy’,”_ the voice declared, once the door had closed behind him. _“Remove the punishment slip from the dispenser.”_

There was a mechanical ‘zip’ noise to his left, and Anakin saw a panel on the wall with a slot beneath a sign reading:

PUNISHMENTS

A moment later, a thin rectangular token protruded out from the wall. Anakin, without thinking, reached for it and pulled it out of the slot.

_“At the end of shift, present the punishment slip to your section chief. Have a wonderful day!”_

Anakin glanced at the token under his flashlight. It was metal, with a decoration of black lines, and on one of those lines he read the words:

**THE PEACE  
-BRINGER**

He had the nauseating feeling this was the start of another one of the trials that someone in this place seemed to enjoy making him suffer through.

_Joke’s on them, this time_ , he thought. _There’s no way they can do anything worse to me than what they’ve already done._

Putting the token in his pocket he glanced around the room. Apart from the exit to the outside world there were only two doors, one on his left and one directly in front of him. On his left was a plain reception desk and above that a portrait. The colour was difficult to tell beneath his own flashlight, and it was a blurry, impressionist style of painting, but he easily recognised the silhouette of Darth Vader amongst what looked like geysers of flame against a background of fire.

“Like to have paintings of yourself up here, asshole?” Anakin muttered out loud.

There was writing on a brass label on the frame of the painting, so he vaulted over the desk to see what it said:

_Birth of the Avenger_

Avenger? Who the hell is this guy supposed to be avenging? The Sith?

He snorted. _Because the Sith all cared about each other so much, right?_

Turning around he was presented with a mostly featureless desk sporting a terminal that was completely dead, a drawer containing a spare power cell and a couple of bacta strips, and a large button with the instruction PRESS TO OPEN

Anakin pressed it, and the door opposite the entrance opened with a loud clang.

However, as soon as he took his finger off the button, the door closed again. Anakin clicked his tongue in annoyance and tried the other door – locked. The only way forward was through the ‘press to open’ button.

This problem at least wasn’t exactly difficult to solve. He pushed the button again and when the door opened he threw the wrench into the doorway so the handle lay over the threshold. When he took his hand off the button the door slammed against the handle of the wrench, jamming itself open.

Anakin jumped over the desk again and made his way to the door, putting his hands over the edge and pulling it so that it opened further. It really wanted to close on him, he could feel it, but he manoeuvred his body around so he was pushing instead of pulling and squeezed through the gap kicking the wrench out into the next room as he went.

Only when he was all the way in and the door slammed shut behind him did he realise he hadn’t left himself a way to get back. And there was no ‘push to open’ button in this room.

_Oh,_ he thought. _Guess I really am a stupid fuckup, then_.

He picked up the wrench and observed the tiny room with a sigh. It was barely bigger than a storage closet, with a square platform surrounded by waist-high rails on which there was a podium with a control panel. The control panel had one button, and one hole where there had once been a button that was now ripped out, leaving a few wires exposed.

Above the hole, was a mostly scratched out label of:

**UP**

Above the only working button, was a semi-scratched out label:

**DOWN**

_An underground complex, then_ , thought Anakin, running his fingers through his hair. That explained a few things.

Seeing very little other choice, Anakin jumped onto the platform and pressed DOWN.

The lift jerked to life, and began to carry him down into a deep, dark hole.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, now we come to the third of the four sections of this story. Tune in next week, when Anakin has more flashback sequences and gets to listen to some sick mix tapes!
> 
> Thank you again for reading! :D


	14. Research Station

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Greetings, everyone who's read this far, and thank you for reading this far. Thank you also if you've left kudos, and especially if you've left a comment - they are a big help to me!
> 
> In this part, we flash back to more of Anakin's delightful childhood (I'm actually lying - it's not delightful at all), some recordings - possibly left by the mysterious 'Wise Man' - are found, and my readers who are unfamiliar with Silent Hill 2 begin to realise why I've been asking 'Will you go down?' so often...
> 
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The walls were breathing.

Red, rough and shiny wet, for a moment Anakin was afraid he was traveling down the throat of some giant creature, but with a closer look he could see it wasn’t the whole channel that inflated and deflated in rhythm, just parts of it, and at different tempos. It was like hundreds, or thousands of bodies had been skinned and then glued together to make this tunnel – and at least half of them were still alive and breathing –

In-out

In-out

In-out

It was impossible. Literally. Some kind of mechanism was at work here – he couldn’t smell blood or rotting flesh, only smoke and sulphur, burning – the heat wasn’t any better in here than it had been outside and he began to think that maybe it was a bad idea to be travelling underground when he was within a few miles of an active volcano.

_Add it to the list of your bad ideas, Chosen One. You must be reaching novel length by now, right?_

As he descended the sound of machinery started to become audible, then louder, then ear-splitting. A pattern of gigantic moving gears like you’d have only fond in some primitive technophobic backwater these days. Clink-clunk, clink-clunk, clink-clunk, screech, screech, screech. He almost shut his eyes and put his hands over his ears.

Again the heavy door to the basement of The Palace flitted into his mind, the day Ringa had sent him down there to fix her generators.

And Nini…

“Ani, there are some things going on down there that you shouldn’t see, because you are too little. So, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to hold on to your hand really well, and you hold on to your tools, and then I’m going to put my other hand over your eyes until we reach the door to the generator – but I promise you, I won’t let you fall. And I’ll tell you when you can open your eyes, okay?”

He nodded. “Okay.”

Curious as he was, Mom had told him there were bad things going on at the Palace that he shouldn’t look at.

It might have been like the jewel-thief: the scaled vulture that swept over the desert looking for jewels. If children were good and kept their eyes on their work, and worked hard, the jewel-thief wouldn’t see them. But, if they took their eyes off what they were doing and looked up, the jewel-thief would see their eyes’ light, and she’d swoop down as swiftly as the wind and rake them out with her talons.

There were lots of monsters like that on Tatooine. Anakin thought the jewel-thief probably looked a bit like Ringa.

Anyway, it would be a big bother for Mom if Anakin lost his eyes, so he resolved to do what he was told.

“And Ani…” said Nini, hesitantly.

“Hmm?”

“… try not to listen to what they might be saying down there too. They use a lot of bad words.”

_“Filthy little whore, this is all you’re good for, isn’t it!?”_

In the present, Anakin put his hands on the railing and stepped back, leaning against it but with his head hanging as far from the walls as he could get it.

“Focus,” he muttered to himself. “There is no emotion…”

_That’s not going to work, when you fail utterly at being a Jedi_ , a voice inside him taunted.

“There is no emotion…”

The generator from earlier – the exact same model – now his mind had wandered back there he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Vader must have known, somehow. He must have researched Anakin thoroughly. It wouldn’t have been impossible to find out.

Fuck. Ringa had met her end in Jabba’s actual palace, but Nini…

If this had been ‘The Winds of Freedom’ Nini would have been murdered by a client, or dead of an overdose, or have walked out into the desert until her detonator chip activated and blew herself to smithereens, but the truth was Anakin had no idea what had happened to Nini – she might have been alive and well and freed by a kind person or on a chained collar held by a Hutt, or a pile of bones in the sand right at that very moment.

_“There are a lot of people suffering in the galaxy, Anakin. Many who don’t need you any less than those on Tatooine simply because you don’t know them personally.”_

Anakin saw one part of the wall convulsing wildly, like that single spot alone was in the throes of a seizure, and he stared at it until the elevator passed it by. Then he hung his head, taking deep breaths.

“I’m going to open the door now, Ani,” Nini’s voice told him, in his memories. “Are you keeping your eyes closed tight?”

He nodded firmly.

“Okay. Here we go, then.”

When the door to the basement opened Anakin was hit with a waft of slightly cooler air, smothered in incense. It was nowhere near as cool as it should have been had the air conditioning been working, but he kept his eyes closed, as he’d promised.

The snapping sound of a lash on bare skin had not been unfamiliar to him. He’d had an idea of what sort of place it was then – a punishment room – and thought he wasn’t too young to see slaves punished. He’d seen it before.

But he kept his promise.

“Filthy whore – this is all you’re good for, isn’t it!?”

“Yes, Master. I’m sorry for being such a filthy whore, Master. I hope I’m pleasing you, Master.”

Nini’s hand had felt warm and dry on his forehead – silky smooth as well, from the cosmetics The Palace gave her. The room was filled with sighs and pained-sounding gasps.

“We’re going down now, Ani. Don’t worry, we’ll go slowly. Can you feel the first step?”

He slid his foot forwards until it reached a dip. “Mm-hmm.”

“Okay.”

One step.

“Are you looking for me to tell you you’re doing a good job? You useless, vain little turd.”

Two steps.

“You even smell like shit, you’re so vile. You expect me to give you praise?”

Three steps.

“Oi, Nini, what’s that little brat doing here?”

Four steps.

“He’s the junker’s boy, Deltar. He’s here to fix the generator.”

Five steps.

“About time, too,” (a different voice) “This slut’s disgusting enough without her sweating all over the place like a disgusting pig.”

Six steps.

“I’m sorry, Mistress. I’m sorry I’m a disgusting – Ow!”

“Did I say you could speak!?”

Seven steps.

“Eh… maybe we should… keep it down a bit – “

“Do you think I care if that little brat hears me? Probably be down here himself in a few years.”

“That’s gross.”

Eight steps.

“We’re almost at the bottom, Ani, just keep going.”

Nine steps.

“Ow – you’re hurting me, it hurts!”

“Oh, stop.”

“No, it hurts!”

Ten steps.

“Sir, can I please asked you not to do anything – “

Eleven steps.

“ – that might cause permanent damage to the house’s property?”

“What? Don’t you have bacta here?!”

Twelve steps.

“The next one is the bottom, Ani.”

“Yes, but not the burn-specific kind, sir.”

Thirteen steps.

“A little peeling is fine, but we can’t let you inflict third degree burns if you can’t show us you have the means to pay for their removal.”

“Okay, Ani, keep walking forward now. We’ll stop at the door and I’ll let you in.”

“Cute kid. Is he really old enough to be fixing generators?”

“Oh, yeah – that’s Watto’s kid. That Toydarian greaseball – little genius, he’s got there. He sure as fuck won’t be working _here_ if anyone ever wants to turn a profit on him, eh, kid?”

“Can we… not talk to him…?”

“I assure you everything is all right, sir. The boy is only here to fix the generators so we can get the air conditioning working again. I apologise for any inconvenience caused.”

“Okay, wait here, Ani, I’m just going to open the door.”

He heard a door slide open, and Nini gave him a gentle push.

“Just walk forward a little – there you go. I’m going to wait outside so no one comes in while you’re working, okay? You can open your eyes as soon as you hear the door close.”

The door closed.

It had been the exact same system as it had been in the Med Centre. The only thing that had been different was the species that had made its nest in the works, but he supposed there were no desert womprats in Silent Hill.

“Womprats,” he remembered Watto telling him, years earlier, finding them in an engine that had come in a lot he’d bought. “Vermin – the mother won’t come back now the nest has been disturbed.”

“What about the babies?” he’d asked.

Watto had grabbed one. “You take it like this, by the scruff of the neck so it doesn’t bite, wrap your fingers around its jaws so its mouth doesn’t open – get a good grip on the body – “

He twisted his hands in opposite directions. There was a snap.

“ – break their neck; we sell them for pet food after. You try. Oh, for goodness’ sake, boy – stop crying!”

By the time he’d found himself in The Palace’s basement, Anakin didn’t cry when he killed baby womprats anymore.

Much.

In the present, the elevator reached the bottom of the run with a thump and a sharp jerk – and all the machinery Anakin could hear clanking away went deadly silent. He opened his eyes.

He was standing in a similarly sized room to the one he’d walked into on the level or who knew how many levels above. He must have traversed two dozen storeys at least. The walls were smooth metal, and the door, thankfully had a nice, easy to operate, ‘open’ button.

Of course when he pushed it a harsh buzzer sounded and he groaned in exasperation. When he tried it again – always happy to remind himself what the definition of insanity was – the buzzer sounded again, but this time he noticed a light flare up to his right.

There was a glass case embedded in the wall, framed with two lights that flashed twice every time he pushed the button to open the door. Inside the glass case was some kind of device with straps, and above it a sign.

**!WARNING!**

**THIS AREA IS EXPOSED TO TOXIC FUMES**

**A RESPIRATOR MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES**

_Oh, you have to be kidding_ , thought Anakin.

He grabbed the wrench from his belt and smashed it into the glass, taking the stupid respirator out; a black full mask with buckled straps. He didn’t see how just throwing it on the floor wouldn’t fool whatever pressure sensor was banking on him removing the respirator meaning he’d actually be wearing it, but if there really were toxic fumes in the area beyond, he supposed he’d better use the respirator given he’d already inhaled who knew what kind of chemicals today.

Shaking glass out of the device he examined the mouthpiece – _ugh, it’s one of the ones I actually have to stick inside my mouth_ – and blinked at a suspicious looking stain.

_Is that… blood?_

_You have to be fucking kidding me_ …

With few options available to him, Anakin shook some of the purified water in his flask over the mouthpiece and wiped in with the inside of one of his sleeves.

_Disgusting… and if this was one of Obi-Wan’s tacky whodunnits, Vader would have stuck a cyanide tablet inside the mouthpiece or something._

Anakin took a deep breath and stuck the respirator in his mouth, fastened the mask around his head, then switched it on. He didn’t die from a poison trap in the mask, but…

…

In-out

…

In-out

…

In-out

…

He could hear his breathing extremely loudly now. The mouthpiece of the respirator was uncomfortable, digging into the inside of his lips and tasting foul. Still, it at least seemed to be working.

_Let’s hope the filter on this thing lasts at least as long as I need it to._

With that, he pushed the ‘open’ button and walked out into the real Research Station.

It didn’t take him long to figure out what this building was all about. The walls were white and there was a very low, blue emergency light in the corridors. Lightsaber and blaster scars were everywhere, along with a large stain of what he suspected of being the same black goo from the med centre dripping down the wall at the end of the corridor. Anakin kept his blaster at the ready and walked to the end of the first hall, which had no doors except the one he’d come in by, no terminals, no signs on the wall, nothing but the blue lights in the top corners, barely helping the flashlight on his chest.

He walked to the end of the corridor where it branched left or right, with one door at each end. For whatever reason, he went left, and opened the door out onto another corridor much like the one he’d come in from.

Uncannily like the one he’d come in from, in all honesty. It made him uneasy. That or the sound of his own breathing.

In-out

In-out

He went down to the end of the corridor again, to another left-or-right turn, and this time chose right.

That door led out onto a third, almost identical corridor, and Anakin’s uneasiness and frustration built higher. _There is no reason to build a system like this,_ he told himself. _Nothing but corridors leading out onto more corridors…_ The in-out noise became a little faster.

At the end of this third corridor he made the choice to go right again, and this time found himself walking into a corridor of twelve little glass rooms with large flaps in the doors and no handles.

Cells.

Each one had a cot, a toilet and a sink. All white and sterile, except for the yellow-brown stain on one of the floors that Anakin preferred not to think too much on.

At the end of this hall there was a transparent box nailed to the wall beside a door, holding a sheaf of paper. Anakin went to investigate, and found the few sheets with handwritten notes clipped to a cheap-looking board. The papers were released with a simple lever mechanism he pushed down on, and he read the top notes.

**Subject** #7278

**Room:** A1

**Age:** 23

Scans reveal foetus deformed. Pregnancy scheduled to be terminated.

**Subject** #6165

**Room:** A2

**Age:** 20

Scans reveal foetus deformed. Pregnancy scheduled to be terminated.

**Subject** #0199

**Room:** A3

**Age:** 31

Foetus five weeks. Further tests to be conducted

**Subject** #4482

**Room:** A4

**Age:** 27

No pregnancy detected. Two more attempts remain.

Anakin flicked through the notes on the following sheets of paper to find them all very much the same, as his skin crawled in the reading. At this point, he just didn’t want to know, and put the papers and clipping-board back in the box.

The door into the next corridor opened easily, and Anakin was almost relieved that it wasn’t leading into a corridor identical to the three that had come before this one – it was much shorter – but then the static on his communicator flared up and he found himself rolling his eyes.

_Of course._ You’d expect to find more of those experiments down here than anywhere else, wouldn’t you?

It was a skinless dog that attacked him, staggering to its feet from where it had apparently just been laying about in the hall, and breathing from nought to hyperventilating in seconds – about three breaths to every one of Anakin’s.

He shot the thing three times and kicked it in the head when it dropped, killing the static on his comm. There was another door on his right, which was locked, and a further two doors on his left. The first locked; the second open.

Anakin walked into another room with six glass cells down either side of the wall. There was a folder on his left but when he took the board out to look at there were only three blank sheets of paper, and one covered in what might have been bloody handprints. Anakin sighed and put it back.

_There’s supposed to be something in here that can lead me to Luke’s father – and hopefully together we can get that kid out of here._

_You don’t even know for sure that Luke’s still alive though, do you?_

_He’s alive_ , he told himself. _I’d know if he wasn’t._

_Why? You felt nothing in the Force when_ Obi-Wan _died._

…

Either way, he had to proceed on the assumption that Luke was alive.

These cells were just as bare as the ones that had been in the last corridor, but through the door at the other end of this hallways there was what looked to be another elevator. This one didn’t even have a space on the control panel where there had once been an ‘up’ button, just a single, green button labelled

**DOWN**

_I should backtrack and check the doors in the other corridors in case they led somewhere worth going_ , he thought, even as he was stepping onto the platform. Something was telling him those doors only circled right back around to the same cells he’d just been through.

He pushed the button DOWN, and the platform began to lower itself into darkness.

*~*~*~*

In-out

In-out

In-out

The further down he went, the harder it was to breathe. Not because there seemed to be anything wrong with the equipment, but because…

Well. Because Anakin was weak.

_Qui-Gon_ , he thought, stumbling out into the next corridor. _You should have left me right where you found me. I didn’t deserve to be a Jedi._

He’d thought so as soon as he’d arrived at the temple after Naboo. Where first it had seemed so light and beautiful all he had been able to think about when he’d walked through the door was how sure everyone had seemed – everyone except Qui-Gon – that they didn’t want him to be there.

The Temple had been… so clean. If nothing else about them did, the sterile white walls of this place reminded him of it – a place where no one was supposed to be. Only, here it was threatening and there it was spotless, and too good for someone who pulled baby womprats out of engines and broke their necks.

That was one of the first things he hadn’t told Obi-Wan. Jedi were supposed to respect all life, after all. If Obi-Wan found out about all the babies, he’d be mad at Anakin and wouldn’t want to train him. And all the other Jedi would think he was gross.

He _was_ gross. Kind people like Chancellor Palpatine might try to tell him otherwise, but even Palpatine didn’t know about the rats.

_Come on,_ he told himself _. Get a kriffing grip already. You’re supposed to fight a Sith Master soon._

_You can’t do it. You’re going to die._

_So what? I was always going to die. And anyway, I beat Dooku, didn’t I?_

Anakin stumbled through the blue corridors until he reached a door that actually had lettering on it. He had to kill two more dogs and a sphere-headed droid to get there, but still – it felt like some kind of achievement.

LAB 1

Not exactly a place he felt eager to get into, considering – but he supposed he had to.

He was surprised when the door opened for him easily. It led into a large room cluttered with strange devices on walls of counters, shelves, a biobed in the middle of the room with a wicked-looking contraption built around it and freezers with transparent doors holding row upon row of samples in test tubes, each labelled with a string of numbers that made no sense to him.

The most noticeable thing about this room to him was the darkness he felt within it. Not just any sort of bad vibe from what was obviously the laboratory of a madman – or woman, depending on whether this had been where Zeall or Phanti worked. No, this was like being able to hear scratching on the other side of the door, except only in the Force.

There was something of the Force inside this place that he could actually sense, if only barely.

And it was of the Dark Side, for sure.

Most of the light in the room was coming from inside the freezers, and it drew his attention immediately to the fact that the tubes he saw in the racks each contained different volumes of the same, crimson red liquid except for one, single, solitary tube – whose contents were green.

It might have been important. Anakin opened the freezer and took out the green tube, inspecting the serial number on the cap that, unlike those on the other tubes, was in bold.

**287496**

This particular string of numbers meant nothing to him. But he got the feeling that it really should, so he took the whole tube with him.

He didn’t finish exploring the lab there, however, trawling the shelves for any more clues he could find. Most of the devices he didn’t recognise – but he knew a data storage library when he saw one, and there was one lying in the biobed, beneath a machine whose claws all pointed in at it.

_Really? ‘Claws’_? He sneered at himself. _Did you forget what an automated surgical theatre looks like, moron?_

There didn’t seem to be any power getting to the bed or the theatre that surrounded it, but Anakin still hesitated before putting his hand within reach of the laser-scalpel attachments.

However, this was not a cheap, scary holo-film, and the implements did not come to life and start slicing his arm up, nor did he hear a scary noise and open a foreboding door only to find a stray tooka messing about in an ancient underground Sith lab. He retrieved the box from the bed and brought it to one of the tables, where there was an unusual playing device.

The chips – not really chips, too large and devoid of circuitry. They seemed to store their information on some kind of magnetic tape of all things – were not compatible with his own communicator, but a quick once-over and he could more or less figure out how they worked with the archaic player on the table.

He put in the first tape. There was static, and then…

_“… – nother dead end.”_

A male voice, deep and scratchy, like it was trying to disguise itself. No visual output, which was frankly a relief after what he’d seen over the last few days, and the audio was very bad, but Anakin listened closely to as much of it as he could.

_“Not that… – th Phanti, rather she seems to have… – ubled her efforts on her dau… – ving that she was the key to her success. Why she bel… – not say, but if the records are correct, it… – haps… – vidence in the town so far that the girl wa… – ower in the Force, yet these files clearly state she… – her mother had any form of success.”_

_“Unfortunately, once gov… – r_ _é no further research into the subject… – deed, Oloré, the stupid woman, seems to have been convinced that the child… this point being trained among the Jedi, was in fact… – ocy, that is rein – tion. From what I can tell, the truth of… – by never got back to the Jedi, or else the question… – ised ‘Chosen One’ – “_

Anakin sat forward immediately.

_“ – would no doubt ha… – stead, according to the diary of Caden… by the knight, that… – alled ‘natural way’, no doubt blaming the… some evil Sith ‘sex ritual’. Ha! Though… – ccurs to me, he must have known the truth. Did he not believe? Or… – terest, for the truth to be suppressed? Either I would believe of a Jedi, but with… know I should dearly like to take a look… – chives say on the matter.”_

There was nothing else intelligible on that particular tape.

_‘Chosen One’_ , Anakin thought. _Why was he talking about the Chosen One?_

Had the Sith who’d created this place been doing some sort of research into the prophecy?

What did that mean for Anakin?

The Jedi knew something about this place: that much he was sure of now. But maybe it wasn’t the Council who had been keeping quiet about its true nature. Maybe it was the fault of ‘the knight’ this tape was talking about – the one Maul had mentioned. The one from Obi-Wan’s ghost story.

With a sudden, metaphorical click, Anakin remembered the metal discs from the apartment. ‘The Knight’ had been the first one he’d found, followed by ‘The Father’, who was either modelled after Zeall – judging by the statue from earlier – or was in fact meant to _be_ Zeall. It wasn’t all that much of a stretch to connect the first disc with this other, even more elusive Jedi.

It was difficult, however, to come to more conclusions based solely on what he’d heard on the tape. Who the hell it was speaking on it, for instance, was still a complete mystery.

There were six tapes in the collection, and the next one was entirely unintelligible. Anakin breathed in through the respirator, tried to ignore the headache the straps encircling his skull were giving him and listened to the static for a good ten minutes before the recording stopped. Then he let out a frustrated sigh and moved on to the next.

The third tape had this to say, from the same voice as before:

_“Silent Hill. So far as I can tell the original purpose of colonisation of the planet was indeed as a simple vacation resort… wide variety of indigenous landscapes… – tient life. One imagines that the difficulty in accessing the location put… – to those plans, however at that point the knowledge of the planet… – anti or Zeall at least, must have known. But how did they know about the great wellspring in the Force? Or wa… – ple coincidence?”_

_Wellspring?_ Anakin wondered. _Not exactly what I’d call this place. More of an abyss, if anything…_

_“Unlikely. It is only… natives on the planet, should I ever find my way out of this town. I have enough hyperfuel to leave the system now, but I shall first have to make it back… – lent Hill, who will decide when they are finished with me.”_

There was a grim chuckle. Hearing mention of the hyperfuel, Anakin wondered: was this the ‘Wise Man’ speaking?

_“Still, how the well was known is ultimately irrelevant. How the well was poisoned – now, that is a more inter… – tually have been the suffering of Phanti’s daughter, and certainly she would have wished – such a thing. Yet this hole in the Force – it is not as I have encount… – arkness creates a strong presence of the Dark Side, not a lack of any sort of… – uld it have been the birth of the child, then – and why?”_

_“Certainly I believe it pos… – maly in the Force could have d… But for the curse to have lingered so long… a greater power than I ever expec… – esting to see if these results will be replicated, when the time comes.”_

Replicated?

Anakin stared at the box as if he could reach through it and shake whoever it was that was suggesting such a thing. So much for his being ‘Wise.’

_“ – said for the veritable ‘demons’ walking the… – side. It is diff… – to believe their appearances not tailor-made, as it we… – telligent hand, but then it is also true… – well, can also act as a mirror.”_

That bit was clearly referring to the experiments. Tailor-made appearances? Anakin wasn’t sure about the dogs or the droids, but the painted suits – those had to have been made to look like clone troopers.

But then they couldn’t have been made by Phanti or Zeall, could they?

And what did he mean by ‘mirror’?

At any rate, the third tape ended there. The fourth was just white noise.

The fifth played a terrible, screeching, grinding noise, like metal scraping over metal, for almost two minutes before Anakin couldn’t take it anymore and skipped ahead to another part of the tape.

… where the scream was even louder. He skipped ahead only once more before taking the tape out and giving it up as a lost cause.

Not very thorough. Obi-Wan would have been disappointed.

Finally Anakin put the sixth tape into the player and forced himself to keep listening. This tape played the loudest static he’d come across yet, and every second of it started to feel like tiny needles pricking against the inside of his scalp after only a short time.

However, because he had failed to make it all the way through the fifth tape, and was disgusted with himself for that, he dug his fingertips into his knees as he sat on the hard floor and stuck it out with the sixth.

_“_______________ the midichlorians ________________”_

Anakin blinked and leaned in. Midichlorians? Had the Sith been researching them here?

The static continued after that. On and on, like an endless, painful rain.

_“______________ to you, Sidious, should you ever... – cordings, and I hope______________”_

And that was the second time he’d heard the name ‘Sidious’. Or was it? – it had seemed so familiar before, as it did even now.

Darth Sidious… was he also connected to Vader, somehow?

But the last tape ended there, with only those two brief sentence fragments to add to Anakin’s growing list of clues to the nature of this place that posed more questions than they answered.

_Does it really matter what the nature of this hellhole is, though, so long as you kill Vader and get Luke and Jesse off the planet?_

Anakin stood up and gave the rest of the old lab another once-over. The devices on the shelves were stained and when he looked inside one of them he saw nothing that might have been any use to him so far as parts went. Everything had been left uncared for for far too long. He held out no hope that any of the other machines would prove more useful, and after looking at the rusted needles and nozzles for precision laser cutters he didn’t particularly want to touch them.

He didn’t really have room to take an entire box of tapes with him either, so he slotted the first and third into a compartment on his belt and then reached for the last one.

As soon as he tried to eject it a plume of flame burst out of the box, and the tape inside sizzled and smoked. Anakin jerked his hand back and glared at it before leaving the lab.

There was one more door in the length of corridor coming off from the last elevator, and a hatch in the floor at the end of the last hallway. Anakin knew in his heart he was going down that hatch sooner or later, but he used Joss’ eye to get past the scanner for the other door first.

LAB 2

_Let’s hope the sequel lives up to the original,_ thought Anakin bitterly.

As the door slid open a cloud of smoke or steam or something poured out into the corridor, and Anakin could at least say he didn’t regret putting on the awful respirator. He crept in slowly, blaster drawn, to a large room lit with an eerie, deeper blue light than what had been out in the corridors.

There were terminals all around the walls that proved, unsurprisingly, to be dead – some rusted, some burned, some seemed to have been melted with acid of all things, like someone had been doing their best to destroy evidence – but the most attention-grabbing thing in the room were the bacta tanks.

Five large cylinders glowed in the centre of the room. In each case, either the temperature controls had malfunctioned catastrophically, or these tanks had been converted into cryo-chambers, because they were solid with ice from ceiling to floor, showing only the barest shadows of the bodies within the three that had them.

Unlike most of the corpses Anakin had come across so far, these three were female – small and slight; probably human, though he couldn’t tell that much through the ice. Definitely corpses; the only equipment that was working in here seemed to be the lights, so nothing had been maintaining their vitals for who knew how long. And the one furthest from the door…

The one furthest from the door was broken – the transparent material of the tank cracked open and bulging out with ice. And from this ice, the occupant of the tank’s right hand was sticking out of the chamber – wizened, mummified almost, thin and mottled black.

There was a ring on her index finger. Anakin took it, telling himself it wasn’t as though she needed it anymore. He had that feeling that _he_ might. Much as he hated to admit it, he was stuck if he didn’t use the paths that had been laid out for him, whether they led into a trap or not.

The ring was a copper colour – thin and ten-sided rather than round, with an inscription on the inside:

_let me in_

Anakin took a deep breath and added it to his sleeve compartment.

Nothing further in Lab 2 seemed to be of any use, so he left the room and went straight for the hatch. As soon as he was out he heard static on his communicator and groaned aloud. The dog that came panting around the corner, stumbling on its three legs, was no trouble for the antique blaster and fell after a good four shots – but it shouldn’t have taken more than three.

It took more than three, because Anakin actually missed the first one. From less than ten metres, by the time he was ready to fire, he missed a simple shot that a first-year Padawan could have made easily.

He was more frustrated than he really should have been when he kicked the dog’s corpse to make sure it was dead.

_What’s the matter? Feeling tired? Haven’t you been sleeping_ enough _lately?_

He’d seen Obi-Wan go for days without sleep and still look calm and composed.

Everyone would be so disappointed if Anakin came back instead of him.

He took a deep breath.

_Kill Vader,_ he told himself. _Kill Vader and worry about everything else afterward_. 

Holstering his blaster, he made his way to the hatch and gripped the round handle it sported, fully expecting it to be stuck in place. To his surprise it moved – stiffly, but the wheel turned, and after a few unearthly creaking noises he managed to get the small door open.

Anakin shone his flashlight down into the black hole he’d uncovered.

Nothing.

The light picked out the rungs of the ladder that led down from the hatch for some way down, but he couldn’t see any hint of the floor. Just a deep, dark hole. Anakin’s heart began to beat faster.

_I’m the Hero With No Fear_ , he told himself. _So it’s not like I’m afraid of climbing down a hole. There’s no other way forward._

Anakin’s hand felt weak on the edge of the hatch as he manoeuvred himself into position to climb the ladder, but he pushed through it. What else was he going to do – curl up in a corner and cry?

No, he was going to go down this hole, find Vader, and kill him. Count Dooku and those Tuskens would look hale by comparison when he’d finished with Vader.

Perhaps the shock had put a hold on it before now, but as he slipped down the hatch rung by rung he was beginning to feel it again.

The anger.

And all this… the old lab, the secrets, the Sith and the monsters – for a while they didn’t matter.

Just climbing down the ladder, step by step. Angry. So angry.

They’d taken Obi-Wan away.

When the door above him slammed shut, blocking out the dim light from above, he didn’t even care.

*~*~*~*

Clang, clang, clang. Anakin’s boots on the rungs of the ladder echoed in the claustrophobic tunnel down into the darkness for what seemed like hours, along with the hiss of the respirator.

In-out

In-out

In-out

_How far down am I, even?_ he wondered.

He’d had to take two long elevator rides before getting to this stage and he still couldn’t see the bottom when he looked beneath himself. The weight of everything that was between him and the surface began to feel much heavier now, and he imagined the whole system collapsing on him while he was miles underground – trapping, crushing, suffocating him where he’d never be found. Hidden away with his failure. His hands tightened around the ladder rungs and he paused to take a few deep breaths.

Obi-Wan had theorised that the chasms they’d seen outside had been caused by disturbances underground. Maybe these labs had something to do with that. Damned if Anakin knew anything.

His teachers would have advised meditation. It wasn’t like he had anything better to do.

_Not really in the right mindset for that, am I?_

So Anakin just kept going down.

His limbs started to ache after a while. A while longer, and they ached more. Then his foot slipped on one of the rungs and he grabbed on to the nearest bar tightly, crushing his chest painfully against others. He scrambled to get a steady footing again, and then he kept going down.

With the pain his muscles were in it was even more difficult to focus on anything but the climb, one step after another, after another, and all of the things that didn’t make sense about the planet or its history, and all his fears of what was waiting for him at the bottom – and what he’d left back at the top – were muted.

Step, by step, by step. It occurred to him he should have kept track of how long he’d been climbing, if only so time passed alone could make him feel like he was making some kind of progress, but it was probably a bad idea to look at the chronometer now, while he’d found a rhythm.

_Just keep going down_ , he told himself. _It’s not like they tunnelled all the way into the centre of the planet so they could make a few rabid animals. You have to –_

What he had to do flew out of his mind as again his foot missed the next rung, and this time his aching arms were too uncoordinated to grab the ladder higher up.

Anakin fell like the darkness had reached up and grabbed him around the waist to pull him down.

His heart stopped.

The floor slammed into his back, knocking the wind right out of him. His head hit it a split second later and the strap of the respirator dug in painfully. For a moment his chest wouldn’t move at all and then with a great effort he managed to suck in some oxygen, as he tested his limbs for any damage.

Apart from bruises, there was nothing. With a glance at the wall in front of him he could see why he’d missed the ladder rung – he’d been standing on the last one already.

He’d fallen a grand total of about four feet.

Anakin lay there for a moment and wondered if he should even bother trying to get up.

The thought was brief – a slight glance to his left and he could see another light source coming from around the corner of the tunnel he’d fallen into. Looking into it was something to do other than lying there and waiting to die in a hole because he was useless and had failed his Master, so he pulled himself up from the floor and stood, bracing himself on the wall.

It was brick – and the floor unfinished dirt. Reminded him of some of the ancient catacombs he’d seen on planets whose civilisations predated space travel. Behind him, his flashlight travelled far enough to reveal a dead end, so the path towards the light was the only one for him to take – unless he’d felt like going back up.

As if.

Switching his flashlight off to help conceal himself, Anakin crept towards the other source of light, trying to minimise the noise of his movements and to not care about the pain in his limbs. The shock from the abrupt landing was already wearing off, but having climbed down all that way his legs were not at their best, and the joint between metal and flesh in his right arm was stinging like someone had run a sharpened knife around it.

He went forward, peeking around the corner to where the light was coming from and blinking in surprise. Situated within the tunnels that appeared to have been barely touched by sentient hands was a structure – a room, circular and half coming out of the wall, with a keypad lock on the door and four long, tall windows with arched tops set around the sides from which the light was coming through.

It was surprising to Anakin not least because long, high windows hadn’t exactly been in tall supply in this town, nor the stark, white light that illuminated the space. But also, because he could see movement from within the room.

There, on the other side of the window in the room bathed in white light, was Luke, frowning at a square bit of paper he held in gloved hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What are the odds, huh? Tune in next week to find out if Anakin can help Luke finally locate his mysterious missing father!


	15. Labyrinth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, everyone! Happy first-chapter-of-February, and thank you for getting this far!
> 
> In this chapter, Anakin and Luke have to jump - one might even say 'magic jump', ha ha ha (I hope you all get that one) - into a hole in the ground, where they find Vader's man-cave. And he's left something interesting behind there for them...
> 
> Hope you all enjoy it! 
> 
> ... especially if you enjoy it enough to leave me a comment, but no pressure!
> 
> >>>>>>>>>>

Anakin stumbled forward with a sudden panic.

_Stupid kid isn’t wearing a respirator!_

He ran to the door and started thumping on it like a lunatic. Luke whirled around and raised his blaster, dropping the paper, and even though he could see him through the windows a long moment passed before he actually recognised Anakin behind his mask, and his blue eyes went as wide as satellites.

“Anakin?”

Anakin saw his name mouthed through the door. A split second later, after Anakin had given him an exasperated look, Luke rushed to open it with an almost comical look on his face.

“Anakin!” he cried happily, in greeting.

As soon as the door between them was opened Anakin barged in, throwing his arms around the kid and pulling him to his chest, his right hand pushing the kid’s head into his shoulder.

The door closed again behind them. Luke said nothing, but he didn’t struggle against Anakin’s hold either. He brought his own arms up around Anakin’s back and held on, patting his shoulder a little awkwardly, perhaps, but without complaint.

And he might very well have complained. They’d only met the day before yesterday, and Anakin wasn’t this forward with anyone outside his close family – not even Obi-Wan…

… except for just before he’d been…

Without warning he pushed Luke away again and held his shoulders firmly at arm’s length.

“What the hell are you thinking?” he wanted to scream at him.

He stopped after only the first two syllables, realising that with the respirator’s mouthpiece in the way he wasn’t going to be saying much. Luke had clearly been able to survive long enough to get to this point without one though, so Anakin felt there was no danger in pulling the straps of the damn thing open and yanking it off his face with a noise of disgust.

He took a moment to breathe normally again.

“Are you ok – “

“What were you thinking?!” Anakin gasped, taking the flask from his belt and pouring what was left of the purified water inside it over the mouthpiece.

“What was I – hey, you were the one who tricked me so you could lock yourself up in a room with who knows what!?” Luke exclaimed, and sounding quite annoyed by it too.

Anakin paused, having forgotten all about that little detail.

“It was one of those things,” he explained. “Too dangerous for a rookie. Sorry.”

“Sorry!?” cried Luke. “For crying out loud – I thought you were dead!”

Initially Anakin tried to brush that off, but then he stopped, suddenly realising –

“What, until just now?”

“Yes, until just now!” Luke yelled, looking up at him the way Padme sometimes did when he’d done something she really didn’t like. “I tried everything to get into that room – but… well, it’s a long story – “

“I’m sure it is,” said Anakin, “but right now I’m a little confused. I got tossed around a bit in there,” Luke’s eyes somehow went wider, and he tried not to cringe. “and I passed out after I killed the thing. Woke up in a bacta tank – I figured it must have been you who…”

Luke shook his head, shifting to confused and worried, as Anakin no doubt mirrored him.

“No, I don’t know who could have… what about your friend, did you ever find him?”

There was a long pause.

“Oh,” said Luke. Then, “I’m sorry, Anakin.”

“Vader,” Anakin said simply. “But I don’t think _he_ was the one who shoved me in that tank.”

“No, it doesn’t seem like him,” Luke agreed. “From what I hear he’d kill any Jedi as soon as lay eyes on them, and the only reason he wants me alive is – “

“Vader wants you alive?”

“Yeah,” Luke nodded, a troubled expression on his face. “He put out a bounty on me a while back – alive only. The people I talked to think he wants me to be his…”

“Apprentice,” Anakin finished. Again, Luke nodded: ruefully this time.

“Ben told me my father was a very powerful Jedi. That might be why Vader is after me.”

Made some sense.

“Yeah,” said Anakin. “Well – over my dead body.”

“Don’t say that,” said Luke, but Anakin ignored him.

“And speaking of dead bodies – did you not see the sign on the way in saying this place was full of toxic fumes?”

Luke blinked.

Anakin sighed heavily. “Look, I know you’ve survived so far, obviously, but… kriff, just put this on, will you?”

A dubious expression came over Luke’s face.

“Come on,” said Anakin. “If there _are_ still toxins down here then we should at least share.”

“… all right,” agreed Luke, at length. “But I’m going to try and modify this mouthpiece so I can still talk to you while wearing it. Don’t worry, I’ve seen one like this before. And here, I just refilled my water so you can have half.”

Anakin sighed with relief. He also felt kind of stupid, because as soon as Luke said it he realised it wouldn’t have been difficult at all to spend a few minutes modifying the respirator so he didn’t have to have the mouthpiece actually inside his mouth – it wasn’t a mini-rebreather like the standard-issue one he’d stupidly forgotten or lost at some point, the mask part sealed around his nose and mouth for protection.

He took roughly a third of the water from the canteen Luke handed him. Luke also gave him the paper he’d been looking at before he sat down on a bench to work. The room they were in looked like a miniature med-bay with two biobeds and cupboards around the back wall. The paper, to Anakin’s surprise, was not some morbid, cryptic note left by a long-dead lunatic, but a rather basic and conspicuously unfinished floorplan.

“I’ve been filling that in as I go,” Luke told him, opening a mini tool-kit of his own. “There are five paths branching off from this part of the tunnels, and I’ve managed to explore three of them as much as I can. Did you come down from the labs?”

“… yeah,” said Anakin, slowly. “Isn’t this… also part of the lab?”

Briefly, Luke glanced back at him and Anakin caught a flash of anxiety in his eyes. But when he replied he was clearly trying his best to sound positive.

“Honestly I have no idea what this place is,” he admitted. “So far all I’ve found is… blank rooms.” He hovered a mini-driver over the respirator. “And those dog-things, of course.”

The idea of Luke having to fight his way through hordes of the experiments twisted something inside Anakin, as he examined the makeshift map. But he focused. The way he’d come in from and the path leading back up above ground was set out in a few diagrams, and confirmed for him that the paths he hadn’t fully explored above had all ringed around to the same places anyway. Some of the doors Luke had been able to get into were ones Anakin remembered as locked, while others were marked ‘Locked’ when Anakin had been able to get inside. But then –

“How did you get down here, anyway?” he asked Luke.

Luke grimaced and held up a transparent cube with an eye preserved inside, such as the one Anakin had. But it was a brown eye.

The two original owners must have had access to different places, he deduced, showing Luke Joss’ eye for confirmation before getting back to the map.

“Retinal doesn’t open anything down here though,” Luke told him. “All these doors take metal keys. I’ve found one for the last path out of here and that’s it.”

Anakin’s gaze roved over more small diagrams of short stretches of corridor. Some rooms came off these halls here and there on the map but most doors were labelled ‘locked’, and there were few enough even of those. He focused in on the level they were on now, the round room and five branching paths leading off from it. Only one remained that did not yet have a note pointing to another diagram.

“I’m going to need some more paper after this,” Luke commented. “There’s some in one of the drawers there.”

He nodded to the cupboards on the other side of the room and Anakin decided he may as well make himself at least a little useful. At the same time,

“Have you found any sign of your father?”

There was a brief silence.

“Well… signs, yes.” Luke sighed. “Nothing conclusive, but I’m sure he at least was here at some point. Every time I’ve had even the briefest glimpse of the Force since I got here, that’s what it tells me.”

He glanced up from his work, meeting Anakin’s eyes.

“And I’m pretty sure he needs my help.”

Luke still looked like a twelve-year-old Padawan; small, with big eyes and a slight frame. But the look in those eyes, and the conviction in his voice… somehow, despite everything, Anakin felt the corners of his lips twitch.

“He’s lucky to have a son like you.”

His cheeks reddening, Luke shrugged sheepishly and went back to adjusting the mask.

Anakin smiled. The next drawer he checked – old-style, manual-open – had a cardboard tray with more bits of paper inside, and he took three.

A weird feeling came over him when he picked up the paper though. A premonition, or perhaps a flash-frame of the Force. Every other piece of paper or book he’d come across here – and it was still as odd as anything else that it had been so much in use – had had some sort of note or clue. Useful or not, looking at these blank sheets now made him uneasy. Like someone was preparing to pull the rug out from under him.

“Okay, that’s just about done, there,” said Luke.

Blinking, Anakin looked up from the empty sheets. The lights in this room were too bright, suddenly.

“That was fast,” he remarked.

“Told you I could find my way around anything mechanical,” said Luke with a grin.

Then, abruptly, his demeanour changed.

“I… guess you’re going to want to come with me?” he asked.

Anakin gave him a look. Luke returned it.

“Hey, who ditched who last time around?”

_Fair enough_ , Anakin responded, in gesture.

“Anyway,” Luke continued, “I wouldn’t recommend you stay here. We probably wouldn’t be able to meet back up later if you did.”

“What do you mean?”

Luke grimaced. He said nothing, but gestured to the door as if to say showing Anakin would be easier that telling him. Anakin glanced back at the last path on the diagram that Luke hadn’t crossed off, labelled simply, _‘key – found’_ , then handed the papers back to him.

Wordlessly, he helped Luke put on the respirator. The adjustments gave the sound of his breathing a different pitch, and though he couldn’t see the kid’s mouth with it on, the interior lights illuminated the smile that was in his eyes reassuringly.

“Seems to be working,” Luke remarked. “Come on – I’ll show you the door to the next level.”

He pulled a metal key out of his pocket and gestured to indicate he knew the way forward. For a moment Anakin suddenly thought of Obi-Wan again, of his doubts about Luke and how he still had no real, logical counter for them. But Obi-Wan was gone, and if Luke wasn’t there then that would be all Anakin had to think about, so he discarded that thought and followed Luke out the door.

Luke took him around the side of the round room, past two other branches of corridor, to another tunnel like the one he’d come in by. It was a twisting path, but it only went on for about thirty metres before it came to an end at the foot of a plain, stained door with a round handle and a metal keyhole.

There was clear hesitation in Luke when he raised the key, but Anakin could see him push through it: could see the look of a Jedi letting their feelings flow into the Force that in fact reminded him a lot of Obi-Wan, and Luke unlocked the door and opened it.

Then he stood back, inviting Anakin to look inside. Anakin leaned in towards the darkness for a glimpse of what was on the other side of the door.

There was nothing on the other side of the door.

“That’s that, then,” said Luke, trying to sound cheerful.

Anakin just looked at him.

“Okay, I know it seems crazy,” Luke admitted. “But it’s the only way forward.”

“It’s a bottomless pit,” said Anakin.

A circular space about the size of a large elevator shaft, the darkness beyond dropped down further than the light of Anakin’s flashlight could reach, but unlike the hatch he’d come down to get to this spot, there was no ladder – just a long, black drop into nothing.

“Well, it can’t be literally bottomless,” said Luke. “Here,”

Before Anakin could say anything he threw a foil packet of bacta strips into the hole, and before Anakin could shake him and yell at him what a stupid idea that was, Luke held a hand up between them, and waited.

After a long moment, the sound of a small impact travelled back up the shaft. Luke’s eyes smiled.

“See?”

“And how, exactly, do you think _we_ are going to survive that drop?” Anakin asked.

“With the Force,” said Luke, earnestly. “You can feel it too, can’t you?”

With everything that he’d experienced over the last couple of days the suggestion seemed absolutely ludicrous to Anakin at first. But before he could wonder whether it was himself or Luke who’d gone insane, the second part of what Luke had said came through.

_You can feel it._

Anakin reached out instinctively – he couldn’t remember when he’d last tried – and to his amazement, something reached back. A pull, a horde of tiny fibres of one thread of a gigantic tapestry that he could feel in every part of his body. It was faint, like a voice on a damaged recording, but here – on the precipice of this dark abyss – here was the Force.

Nothing about any of this made sense. Even though Anakin knew there had to be an explanation, it was so far out of the realm of his understanding that he didn’t know where to begin.

The Force was here – at the bottom of this hole.

“Well, I’ll go first,” said Luke, and Anakin threw his arm out in front of him as he moved forward.

That moment of contact made the ghost of the Force flare stronger. They each looked toward each other at the same time, searching blue eyes for a reason to why they were suddenly looking. There was something about Luke… ever since he’d first laid eyes on him that…

Luke was very powerful in the Force, that much Anakin could articulate to himself. But that wasn’t the whole story, there was something else.

Moments elapsed, and with whatever conclusion he had come to about Anakin in turn, Luke spoke again.

“… okay. Then we’ll go down together.”

Something told Anakin he wasn’t going to do any better than that. Even if he knocked the kid out here and now, he’d only jump down after him as soon as he woke up.

Besides, the single thread of the Force that he could feel was pulling them both down this path. Jedi were supposed to listen to that kind of thing.

“All right,” he said reluctantly. “But while we’re down there you need to do exactly as I say.”

There was no trying to hide Luke’s incredulity at this command, but he didn’t actually protest. Not that that meant he had any intention of following Anakin’s instruction, of course.

Anakin turned to the hole again and looked down. There was only blackness, yet Luke was right. This was where they had to go. He took his arm away to let Luke stand beside him and took a deep breath.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Ready,” confirmed Luke.

They jumped into the pit.

*~*~*

In the Darkness, Anakin heard a voice.

He recognised it, but it had been distorted somehow, and he couldn’t make it fit with a name or face. It was male – Obi-Wan’s perhaps, or Qui-Gon’s, or Chancellor Palpatine’s – but try as he might he couldn’t make out a single individual word except –

_Anakin…_

_Anakin…_

_Anakin…_

…

…

Then, there was a floor of cold, damp earth beneath his hands and knees, and the sound of the door above slamming shut.

They had landed in a very small, closed off space with no visible features, but Anakin was not alarmed, nor did Luke seem to be. The Force had not disappeared with their fall – there was still that slightest sense of a pull within his body, to a seemingly random spot on the wall. Luke walked to the same spot.

“Did you bring – ?”

Anakin held up his wrench.

“Ah,” said Luke, and stood back.

The composition of the wall in front of them was unknown to Anakin – some kind of plaster-like material that cracked easily and crumbled into powder. It was weak, and that was a good thing, because his arm felt weak too and he didn’t want to appear that way in front of Luke.

A dozen or so blows against this false part of the wall and Anakin could see the edge of a door. He breathed a sigh of relief. Luke came forward again to help him pull away more of the covering material, until at last the door was revealed to the point where it could open.

And it did open, as soon as Anakin knocked the cover off its controlling mechanism and pulled on the right circuit.

“One million and ten,” said Luke.

“Hmm?”

Anakin looked back and saw Luke brushing some of the muck on the door away, revealing a series of characters stencilled on the metal that made no sense to him, but Luke seemed to understand.

:<<<<:<

“A million and ten,” Luke repeated sheepishly. “I think it’s the same language those books we found were written in. I had to decipher a few words of it earlier to get the key that got us down here.”

“Ah.”

One million and ten. It seemed random, but Anakin committed it to memory anyway.

Pressing down on the door release button, they were finally allowed a glimpse of the room beyond. The door stuttered as it opened, but Anakin managed to push it wide enough for the both of them to get through, and into the dark space beyond.

It shut behind them, and there was no opening mechanism from the inside.

“Aww, now we won’t be able to get back to the bottom of that pit,” observed Luke.

Anakin managed a smile and turned his attention to the rest of the room. It was not entirely void of its own light, and his eyes were drawn to the dim cats-eye lamps ringing the top and bottom of a larger than average bacta tank – a respirator hung from the top into the crystal-clear fluid, and it looked like there was a more complex mechanism above that, probably for a special-needs occupant.

He could still hear Luke’s own breathing beside him, but it didn’t seem as ominous coming from him.

The floor was grated, over a shallow pool, probably for the liquid to drain into when the bacta treatments were completed, though it was a primitive solution. His footsteps echoed on the metal and it was uncomfortable to walk on. The room was…

…oppressive. He suddenly felt the absence of Obi-Wan – the eternal absence, now – in a way that brought it right to the forefront of his mind, like a fist closing around his heart. There was a prickling at his eyes.

_He’s really gone._

_How am I supposed to…?_

_I can’t…_

_I…_

“There’s another door on the other side of the room,” Luke announced. “I’m just going to mark – Anakin?”

Anakin’s eyes had fallen on something else.

There was a small wheeled table by the bacta tank, like you might find medical instruments placed on during an operation, but there was only one instrument on this one and it was hardly ‘medical’ in nature.

Luke followed his gaze. “Is that…?”

Anakin took a step forward. Luke picked up the object, glanced over it, then proffered it toward him. Anakin took it.

“It’s a lightsaber,” he confirmed.

It was: a dark, battle-scarred saber heavier than his own or indeed any he’d ever handled in the past. His hand wanted to hang at his side when he held it. It wanted to let it drop and roll away. Far away. Anakin had no idea how it had been made so heavy.

There was something familiar about this lightsaber though. Anakin switched it on with a dark feeling in his stomach.

The blade extended and held its shape, illuminating the entire room a brilliant, scarlet red.

For a while, the two of them stood there; saying nothing; staring into the red light.

After a long moment, Luke approached him.

“Why do the lightsabers of those who use the Dark Side light up red?” he asked.

Anakin’s eyes narrowed. Extending the blade improved the balance a little, but it made it feel heavier still. He could feel the pressure on the joint between flesh and metal in his arm that came from the ridiculous weight of the hilt – to a painful degree.

“The kyber crystals,” he said. “They make them _bleed_.”

He switched the lightsaber off. It was hardly an exhaustive explanation on his part, but Luke didn’t ask further.

“Should we take it with us?” asked Luke.

There was no rule among the Jedi that you couldn’t use a Darksider’s blade in an emergency. Anakin knew without testing it that his own saber wasn’t going to work properly – the Force was strong enough to tell him that – and a lightsaber would get him past most of these doors easily, not to mention giving them much better protection.

But there was something different about this lightsaber, and not because it was red. The red saber Maul had used back at the Leisure Centre hadn’t been working any better than Anakin’s blue. This thing…

_… so heavy…_

This thing was going to work. The Force that he could still feel in this room told him as much. He’d cut through any further experiments in an instant and be able to take on Vader. That was all that should have mattered, right?

_The quick and easy path, Anakin?_

Words that sounded like Obi-Wan’s floated through his head.

But Obi-Wan was dead – murdered by Vader, and Anakin was going to avenge him whether he would have wanted it or not.

Darth Vader had to be put down one way or the other, after all.

“… yeah,” said Anakin, at last. “Here, you take this rifle,” he pulled the strap off his shoulders and handed the weapon to Luke. It felt significantly lighter than the red lightsaber, and that was absurd, but Anakin wasn’t going to question it now. “I’ll keep the saber.”

“It looks like Vader’s,” Luke observed, taking the rifle and putting the strap over his head. “Do you think this is where he’s been staying?”

Anakin glanced around the grim, claustrophobic room.

“I don’t know,” he muttered. “The Force… the Force feels dark in this place, so I wouldn’t be surprised, but it’s not exactly where I’d imagine the Sith Lord behind the war to hang his cape.”

Something about what he said made Luke’s brow twitch, but he didn’t ask Anakin to clarify anything and Anakin took that as his cue to move to the door on the opposite side of the room.

“We should keep moving in case he does come here,” he said.

Luke’s brow furrowed more. “I thought you _wanted_ to find him?”

Part of him did. The truth was that a large part of him wanted to get as far away from the creature as possible and never let it come near him again. But he answered,

“I’d prefer to get you somewhere safe first. Or at least get us both out of close quarters.”

Luke rolled his eyes at the first part, but let it slide – as if to say ‘yeah, right’ to the idea that he’d let Anakin try to get him out of harm’s way a second time. And Anakin supposed that if Vader didn’t want Luke dead then he didn’t have to worry about protecting him as much – though perhaps he should have thought protecting him from possible conversion to the Dark Side an even higher priority.

Right now he just didn’t want anyone else to die because of his failings.

“You ready?” he asked.

“After you,” said Luke.

Anakin pressed the button on the wall and the door slid open with a screech to the pitch black beyond. There was no light in the corridor outside, though a reflection of what was coming from his flashlight let him know they’d be treading out into a good few inches of water – which was just great. He grimaced.

“Must be a busted pipe or something,” and stepped out into the hallway.

The water was freezing, seeping in at his ankles like vines, and immediately reminded him of –

_Not now. Don’t think of Yrinst of all places now._

“It’s cold, but it’s just water,” he told Luke. The Force would probably have told him as much anyway, if Luke was as strong in it as Anakin believed he was.

He could feel his signature now, despite the Force being as muted as it was. A cool, gentle rain beneath a mild sun. Out of place, but calming. Luke chuckled.

“Looks like a few good harvest’s worth,” he said, following Anakin out into the blackness. He had his own flashlight, which helped with their lighting situation, not that there was anything to light up in this tunnel. “Give it a good clean – they’d buy it in Mos Eisley.”

“You traded around those parts?” Anakin asked. “From what I heard, place made Mos Espa look halfway decent, and that place was a shi – a dump, I mean.”

“A shi-dump, huh?”

“Zip it, kid – I’m trying to set a good example.”

“Well, I think you’re doing fine.”

That… was nice to hear. Luke may have only said so having hardly any frame of reference for what a Jedi was supposed to be – or he would have known just how terrible Anakin was – but Anakin felt like no one had said anything like that to him in a long time, nor would have had reason too again now that Obi-Wan was… and he moved forward a little lighter than before.

… for about five steps, before the static on his communicator started.

“Looks like our friends are down here,” he announced, taking the red lightsaber off his belt.

“Great,” said Luke glumly, “I was starting to miss them.”

Anakin listened carefully for a moment for the sounds of accelerated breathing or rolling pottery, but heard neither. He extended the red blade. “Careful, I think it’s one of those droid things.”

Sure enough, before Luke could say anything the much fainter noise of a sphere-head’s rusted joints staggering through the water came through the noise of static and a black shape encrusted with crystals on its head, chest and thigh crept around the corner at the end of the hall.

“I’ll handle it,” Anakin told Luke.

The droid locked on with its weak laser and fired a burst of green light, which Anakin deflected with the red saber. The beam shot past the droid and into the wall behind it, missing it by a hair thanks to Anakin’s lack of familiarity with the weight of the hilt, but it was no matter – he ran the length of the corridor before the droid could charge up for a second shot and sliced it in half with a single swing.

The pieces fell into the water and the static stopped.

Then started – there were two more coming from the hallway on his right.

“More coming this way,” Anakin called over his shoulder.

When the one in front fired at him Anakin managed to deflect the blast with the red saber into the droid behind it before it could line up its own. It faltered, but didn’t fall right away – not a surprise, the blasts from these things were pretty weak after all – however it gave Anakin more than enough time to run up and lop the sphere from the shoulders of the first. No more than a half-second later, the red blade cleaved the second in two across the shoulders.

The static didn’t stop yet. Anakin turned back just in time to see a green bolt of energy hit the wall at the end of the corridor he’d come in from, followed swiftly by a flash and sound of firing from the rifle he’d given Luke.

“Luke!?” he called.

Before he could go back yet another droid approached him from the front, its first shot almost too quick for him to dodge.

“I’m okay here!” Luke called back. “This rifle has quite a kick!”

A flicker in the hallway meant Anakin didn’t have time to feel relieved. It was not coming from another droid this time, but from his own flashlight, as the battery decided that was the best time to crap out. The white light on the droid vanished, leaving only the red and the little that was coming from Luke’s light around the corner.

_Great,_ thought Anakin, but he didn’t spend too much time worrying – he could still see by the light of the saber, and he raised it to guard against the oncoming droid.

Which suddenly froze. Anakin frowned, hesitating in case it was about to try something he hadn’t seen before.

In a way, it did. As Anakin held the red lightsaber in a guard position, the blade already trembling slightly because it was so onerous to hold up, the droid took a fumbling step backwards. Then another.

Anakin could barely believe his eyes. Though he was only able to stand there a few moments longer before the pull to go back for Luke grew too strong, it was more than enough time to confirm that – for whatever reason – the droid was retreating.

He had a notion too, of what that reason was, because there was only one thing that had changed. Anakin exhaled and ran back around the corner – where Luke was firing at a third of three droids that had come up behind them.

“Luke, turn your light off!” Anakin exclaimed.

Luke glanced at him, questioning, but Anakin didn’t bother to explain before swinging the lightsaber out to block another bolt of green light and reaching around Luke’s chest for the switch on his flashlight, pressing it swiftly and plunging them into much dimmer surroundings.

The light in the corridor narrowed to three small blips on the spheres of each of the droids and the much more powerful red light of Vader’s saber.

And again, the droids stopped.

There was a moment of hesitation, but as Anakin lowered the heavy weapon out towards the droids a fraction, they moved. One by one, each of them took a step back and turned around. They actually seemed to increase in speed as they retreated, stepping back through the water like wounded soldiers.

Anakin waited until all three had disappeared into the darkness before he took a deep breath. Luke looked up at him.

“Well, that’s weird,” he said.

“Tell me about it.”

“I mean, I knew they reacted to the light, and sometimes they’d get confused if we were in total darkness, but they should have still seen us with the saber like that.”

The experiments being confused by darkness was news to Anakin, but then he hadn’t turned his flashlight off since he got it unless he’d been walking into an area with its own light source.

“Timely battery death,” Anakin explained, for his part. “I should still change it though.”

“I have a spare power cell,” Luke offered.

“It’s fine,” Anakin told him. “I’ve got a bunch of them too.”

He assured himself the flashlight was working again when he changed out the power cell and then switched it off – the red saber gave them more than enough light to travel through the corridors by and if the experiments only reacted to the white light then they’d be much safer this way.

At the end of the next corridor was a fork, and Luke took out his map to note down an approximation of the route they’d taken before they decided to pick right.

The right path led them to a dark hole at the end of the hall, circled with a short guard so the water didn’t fall in and with a ladder for them to climb down into it. For a long moment the two of them stood and stared at it in silence. At length, Luke spoke.

“Other way?” he asked.

“We’ll try that one first,” Anakin agreed.

So they put off yet another climb down into what felt like the depths of the planet itself and went back the way they’d come in, this time picking the left path and following it around a corner, whereupon they came to a hallway with a dead end, and two doors on either side of the corridor with some kind of mechanism in the centre.

The mechanism could have been a number of things – including a bomb, so Anakin was cautious about reaching for the handle. Instead, he first waved a hand over the circular attachment, feeling it out in the Force.

_There’s something about it,_ he thought. Threads of large potential energy spooled out from the device. _But I don’t sense death._

_Time to spring the trap._

Anakin reached for the door release, but found himself presented with an anti-climax of sorts – the door was locked and nothing happened. When Luke tried the other door, the same result occurred.

“I don’t believe it,” said Anakin dully. “A locked door. Well, fortunately we have the master key for this one.”

Saying that he raised the lightsaber and thrust it through the side of the door, sliding it up and across with the view to making a new door.

But this was where the jaws of the trap closed, and the circular device on the door activated. With a whir a set of panels opened, and before Anakin could do more than yank the blade of the saber out of the door a set of miniature field emitters extended, and from there a purple light shot forth.

The light split like a fountain in every direction, circling out around the door and dividing into a domed net of bright, crackling electricity, protecting the entire door and doubling the light in the corridor. Anakin could already tell it was impassable with the lightsaber alone.

Things just kept getting better, however, as this started a chain reaction. Not a moment later the field emitters on the door on the other side of the corridor also activated, throwing a protective barrier around it. Anakin could feel a series of vibrations in the water, on the metal floor below it –

The buzz, buzz, buzz of more grid shields activating on other doors throughout the complex.

_You fucking idiot_ , he told himself. _You absolute, fucking idiot._

Seeing red, Anakin took aim with the lightsaber at the wall next to where the grid on the first door had risen, deciding without a second thought to slice through the wall if they were that precious about the fucking door.

“Wait!” cried Luke, grabbing his arm.

Anakin looked at him in a way that made the kid draw back. But he recovered quickly.

“This place is ancient,” Luke warned him. “If you cut through the wrong support the whole thing could come down on our heads!”

He was right – there had already been evidence of destabilisation back on the surface, not to mention the volcanic activity, and for a brief moment Anakin was tempted to do it anyway – bring the whole town down on themselves and hopefully take Vader with them. But it wasn’t something he seriously considered. Not while looking into Luke’s eyes.

There was just enough of the Force open to him in this place to release as much anger and frustration as it took for Anakin to not outright kill them both on top of everything else he’d screwed up.

He took a deep breath.

“Down the ladder, then?”

Luke nodded. “Since there is one, we can always come back up if we find a way to drop these grids.”

“All right. I’ll go first.”

“Really? That’s not like you at all.”

Anakin gave Luke a sharp look, and could tell he was grinning at him beneath the mask.

“Cute,” he told him, and walked back up the corridor to the ladder. He was pretty sure he heard a chuckle beneath the hiss of the respirator.

In actuality he was a little glad for the gentle ribbing – something Obi-Wan, or Ahsoka, or even one of his men would have said. it brought a sense of normality to the situation.

Granted, one he almost certainly shouldn’t have felt, given he’d gotten the man who’d raised him since he was nine years old killed because of his own uselessness only hours ago, but at the same time he recognised the advantage in holding on to that veneer of normalcy, at least until Luke was safe.

It was strange though, Luke’s presence here. Not just in itself, but in how Anakin was reacting to it. He could see it, he wasn’t so far removed from his own actions that he couldn’t, but he didn’t have the inclination to question it. It was too… good that Luke was here for him to contemplate doing so.

They returned to the ladder and this time made the reluctant climb further down into this insanely deep complex, coming out into a small recess in another corridor. Re-igniting the red saber as soon as he was all the way down, Anakin illuminated a more cramped, less flooded, square hallway of rusted metal.

He stepped forward to let Luke jump the last rungs.

“Which way first?” he asked.

“Left?” offered Luke.

It was as good a direction as the other. The left path u-turned around a short bend and then carried on for about twenty metres. There were three doors in this part of the network, and all three had purple grid shields blocking them. Anakin clicked his tongue in annoyance, but said nothing.

There was a right turn into a corridor with two more closed off doors and one where the grid shield emitter had failed. Unfortunately, this one accessible door opened to a room crowded with the shadows of crystallised droids – dozens of them – and Luke pushed for the door to close almost as soon as he’d pushed it open.

“Let’s come back to that one,” he suggested.

Another left turn at the end of this corridor contained only a single, shielded door, and was blocked off at the end by another ray shield. Anakin approached this end to see if the shield emitter in this case was one he could reach and deactivate. Again, it looked like it was being produced from the other side of the shield and they were once again out of luck.

However, before Anakin could turn around and drag them back the other way, he heard something.

“Do you think you can get through – “

“Shh.”

The sound of the respirator on the mask was… off, somehow.

In-out

In-in-out

Out-in-in

Out-out

In

“Luke, hold your breath,” Anakin ordered.

In-in

In-out

In-out

In-out

Clank.

Clank.

Clank.

On the other side of the ray shield, Darth Vader stalked into view.

Anakin was at once seized with a burning rage the likes of which he hadn’t felt since the night his mother died. _Kill Vader_ , he’d been telling himself for hours. _Kill Vader, kill Vader, kill Vader._

_Obi-Wan is gone._

_Obi-Wan didn’t deserve to die like that._

_‘Do you really think you or your master deserve to be saved?’_

How _dare_ he.

Kill Vader. Kill Vader. Kill Vader.

With only that thought in his head he rushed at the ray shield and brought as much Force as he could with him, the pulse of energy and fury shaking the metal walls around him as his blade skittered against the shield with forks of electricity splitting off where they touched.

“Anakin, no!”

Vader turned his head to the noise and stopped.

Despite throwing all his physical and mental strength into the blow, Anakin had not managed to do the impossible and actually get through the ray shield, and he was pushing against it to the point of agony when Vader met his eyes through the black – no, dark red, he’d changed them at some point – lenses of his skull faceplate.

And Anakin’s heart skipped a beat suddenly, because for the first time he felt something in them.

As if, as his heart screamed out – _HateyouhateyouhateyouhateyouHATEYOU!_ – Vader was whispering back –

_Not nearly as much as_ I _hate_ you.

Everything seemed to get darker until Luke put his hands on Anakin’s shoulders and dragged him backward.

“Anakin – look, it’s no use, he can’t get through either!”

Vader re-focused his attention on Luke in an instant, at first making the boy flinch, but then Luke steeled himself and met Vader’s gaze.

Through the ray shield Anakin felt something _other_ than hate from Vader when he looked at Luke. He didn’t know what to call it, but he didn’t like it, and finally he stopped pulling forward to attack Vader and started pushing back. Throwing his saber-arm out in front of Luke to guard him he retreated back down the corridor, snarling –

“Don’t even think it, you monster!”

Vader responded by drawing and igniting the saber that had been at his hip.

Though Anakin tensed up at first, he then thought it was all for show – as Luke had said, Vader didn’t seem to be able to get through this ray shield either – but then there was static on his comm.

From the sound of it it was coming from Vader’s side of the shield, the corridor he was walking towards, and as had been happening since he and Luke had switched their flashlights off, the static started to die away as soon as it rose to warn them of an oncoming experiment.

But this wasn’t good enough for Vader. Head turning toward the sound of the static, Vader stretched out his left arm and clenched his fist. Anakin felt a pull in the Force. The static became louder again, faster, as a sphere-headed droid came flying down the hall – stopping about a metre in front of Vader’s face and struggling in his grip with that weird, gagging noise it made.

The noise trailed off, choking, hissing, the sphere slowly rotating as Vader’s arm turned, and then in a shower of red liquid and buzzing sound of snapping wires, the droid’s head was torn completely off its body, falling to the ground, bouncing once and rolling away.

Drops of crimson hissed as they spattered onto the ray shield. Behind him, Luke cringed and turned his face away, but Anakin kept watching in an almost sick fascination with the carnage.

_This guy… he’s not like the other Sith, is he?_

Vader tossed the rest of the droid aside and with a last, lingering look at Anakin and Luke he resumed walking the way he’d been going before, now faster, so that he was quickly out of sight. Anakin ran to the edge of the ray shield, but only caught a glimpse of him when he tried to look further down that corridor before the rippling black cloak disappeared around a corner.

Anakin finally let out the breath he’d been holding and walked backward a few steps more, pushing Luke away from the ray shield.

“Come on,” he said. “He looks like he knows where he’s going, so we’d better get out of here.”

“Right,” said Luke. He was hesitant though, still looking past the ray shield at the decapitated droid lying in a pool of red. Anakin put a hand on his shoulder with a questioning look, and Luke shivered, turning away at length from the gruesome sight.

Then Anakin glanced back at the droid before leaving, and suddenly a moment of realisation happened to him.

“I get it,” he muttered, looking closer at the droid again. “That’s why the experiments aren’t attacking us. With only the light of the red saber to go by, they must think _I’m_ Vader.”

Everything seem to fall into a deep silence all around Anakin then, like the world had paused and he was the only one still moving. He had turned away, and was looking back down the dark tunnel into nothing but an endless, black void, his own words echoing back at him from beyond.

They must think I’m Vader…

… must think I’m Vader…

… think I’m Vader…

… I’m Vader…

… I’m Vader…

… I’m …

He didn’t understand it, but with the shield behind him, it made that blackness look like the only path he could go down, without any light in that moment, because that one moment seemed to be all there was for the brief time that Anakin lived in it.

Then Luke spoke, and dragged him out of it.

“This respirator probably helps too,” he pointed out.

Anakin smiled at him, not knowing what to say but grateful he’d pulled him from those dark thoughts. Luke’s eyes smiled back.

Whether it was the specific combination of darkness, red saber and respirator or something else entirely this disguise served the two of them well as they continued on through the tunnels below Silent Hill – and they saw nothing of the experiments but fleeing shadows.

*~*~*~*

After a number of dead ends and switching between the first and second floor of this labyrinth, Anakin and Luke came at last to a very different door. Like many of the others it had a ray shield emitter on its centre projecting a grid, but there was a keypad on the door and in a spot he could just reach through a gap in the grid.

“Any ideas?” he asked Luke.

Luke leaned closer. “Hmm. I do have another key, and a token thing, but I didn’t find any codes lying around before I ran into you. Looks like this one takes a six-digit string.”

Six digits… Anakin palmed through the various keepsakes he’d taken.

Wrench, blaster… he still had the cruiser pendant-key from the Med Centre, may as well throw that away, along with the keys to Q3 B2 front door and fire escape, and apartment 4.8… random spearhead brooch he’d found in the street… eyeball in glass – they already knew that wouldn’t work… copper ring, ‘The Peace-Bringer’ slip…

… the Sith holocron Maul had given him. There was something about it that –

_No. I shouldn’t look._

… and then his fingers closed around the green vial from Lab 1.

“Here,” he muttered, pulling out the vial. “Two eight seven, four nine six. I don’t know that it’s for this, though.”

“Well, I’m fresh out of any other ideas,” said Luke with a sigh.

Anakin reached through the gap in the beams carefully and input the code. Part of him almost hoped it didn’t unlock – the last two times he’d managed to get a code for a door right there’d been nothing but anguish waiting for him on the other side, and he was hardly expecting cake and ice-cream when he opened this door either.

Yet there was nowhere else for them to go.

With an approving hum, the ray shield dropped. A compartment beneath the keypad opened up, revealing a small recess with an indent the same shape as the vial.

“Chemical bio-lock,” said Anakin. “Fancy.”

Before he could place the vial in the holder Luke put a hand on his arm.

His right hand.

He was still wearing a glove, and Anakin hadn’t noticed it before, but if he didn’t know better he’d have said it felt like –

“Here,” Luke said.

Digging into a pouch on his belt he brought out a smaller, triangular vial with fifty millilitres or so of blue liquid inside. About enough to fill Anakin’s vial to the top when added together. There was no writing on Luke’s vial, but there was a universal key symbol and Anakin smiled.

“Good thing we ran into each other before coming down here,” he remarked. Luke’s eyes lit up.

Once the blue in Luke’s vial was added to the green in Anakin’s the liquid turned turquoise, and luminous, and to Anakin’s mind this was a good sign – there was even a tiny thread of the Force telling him so. Anakin placed the vial in the compartment, which closed automatically. There was a click, a whir, and a series of flat beeps, and then the door finally swung open.

The room it revealed was long and narrow, floored with grey metal tiles. There was a door shielded by a grid of purple electricity at one end and a long mirror covering the wall on his left. Another door was built into the mirror, but as soon as Anakin and Luke walked into the room a ray shield dropped over the entire wall, and a grid shield over the door. Directly in front of him, next to the grid shielded-door at the other side of the room, was a raised, white square in the floor.

Printed in an attention-grabbing line from the centre of the floor to the far wall and then going up it, were the words:

**STAND BEFORE THE SINLESS ONE AND YOU SHALL PASS**

But more attention-grabbing by far were the six corpses hanging in electronic restraint fields, lined up in a row along the back wall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next week: the Dead Men puzzle, one of my favourites from the game. I look forward to seeing you all there!
> 
> ... oh, and kudos to anyone who guesses why 'one million and ten' might be on the door to Vader's room. :D


	16. Dead Men

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, guys - happy Valentine's Day for tomorrow, and thanks again for sticking with me this far!
> 
> In this chapter, Anakin and Luke solve a puzzle - with a SHOCKING conclusion, we have a VERY ROMANTIC dream sequence (for Valentine's day, yay!), and finally, a JOYOUS reunion occurs.
> 
> I hope you all enjoy it, and I would love to hear your thoughts on this chapter in a comment!
> 
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Each corpse had a black hood tied over its head, covering its face completely. _His_ face, Anakin should have said, they all looked to be male, roughly similar in height and build, wearing rather archaic Jedi-like robes burned black – likely having been roasted by the restraint field put on overload. The smell of burnt matter in the room was vile.

Each corpse also had a copper medallion hung around his neck.

Anakin frowned. “These restraints must have been on continuously long before we got here. Wonder how they kept the power going…”

“That’s what you’re choosing to focus on!?” exclaimed Luke.

Shrugging, Anakin took his wrench off his belt and following his instinct he used it to turn over the medal lying across the chest of the corpse nearest to the door they’d come in through.

There was an engraving on the other side of the medal.

THIS MAN HAS  
BEEN EXECUTED  
FOR THE CRIME OF  
 **MURDER**  
VENGEANCE HAS BEEN SATISFIED   
AND PEACE RESTORED

“Guess he’s not the ‘sinless one’ then,” he remarked to Luke, who came up next to him to read the pronouncement.

“If it was a _just_ conviction,” said Luke. “ ‘Vengeance’ and ‘peace’… it makes me wonder.”

Luke was right – it didn’t sound like ‘justice’ was the highest priority on the executioner’s list. And this was a former Sith stronghold, so their legal system was pretty suspect.

Anakin stepped away from the first corpse, looking toward Luke turning over the medallion on the second with an insulated pair of retro pliers. It read:

THIS MAN HAS  
BEEN EXECUTED  
FOR THE CRIME OF  
 **SLAVERY**  
VENGEANCE HAS BEEN SATISFIED   
AND PEACE RESTORED

_Good_ , thought Anakin, even knowing he should take the words with a grain of salt.

“I’m guessing they were all executed for one crime or another,” he said, walking to the third. “So who’s ‘the sinless one’…?”

The medallion on the third declared:

THIS MAN HAS  
BEEN EXECUTED  
FOR THE CRIME OF  
 **ADULTERY**  
VENGEANCE HAS BEEN SATISFIED   
AND PEACE RESTORED

The fourth:

THIS MAN HAS  
BEEN EXECUTED  
FOR THE CRIME OF  
 **OATH-BREAKING**  
VENGEANCE HAS BEEN SATISFIED   
AND PEACE RESTORED

The fifth:

THIS MAN HAS  
BEEN EXECUTED  
FOR THE CRIME OF  
 **TORTURE**  
VENGEANCE HAS BEEN SATISFIED   
AND PEACE RESTORED

And Luke turned over the copper circle on the last man’s chest to reveal the words:

THIS MAN HAS  
BEEN EXECUTED  
FOR THE CRIME OF  
 **PERJURY**  
VENGEANCE HAS BEEN SATISFIED   
AND PEACE RESTORED

The pair stood back to consider these latest macabre clues for a moment.

_Murder, slavery, adultery, oath-breaking, torture, perjury._

“I don’t think ‘adultery’ or ‘oath-breaking’ are actually crimes you can be tried for in this day and age,” Anakin pointed out.

“In some places on the Outer Rim none of these things are crimes you can be tried for,” Luke commented.

He had a point. And certainly there were planets out there where the two Anakin had mentioned were still triable offences too, he just hadn’t thought Silent Hill would be among them.

“Makes you wonder why a Sith cult would make them so,” he mused. “What do the Sith care for the rule of law, if it doesn’t increase their own power?”

“Well, if they were already in power,” said Luke, “they’d want as many excuses to get rid of their enemies ‘lawfully’ as they could, so they could maintain it more easily. I don’t think even the strongest Sith could rule over an entire galaxy using their power in the Force alone.”

Anakin had never thought about it that way. He’d always seen the Sith Master, Dooku and all their cronies trying to come to their throne on the backs of a trillion battle droids – it would be those droids, he thought, or supposed he’d thought, that kept the citizens they would oppress in line. Not the law, not by any means.

And yet, what Luke said didn’t ring false either.

“What’s that white platform?” Luke asked, nodding towards the square Anakin had taken note of as he’d come in.

The two of them approached for a closer look and Anakin knelt beside it. It was a shiny, flat block about eighteen square inches and one inch off the ground – strangely clean, compared with everything else he’d found in this hellhole – and definitely a part of the floor somehow. There was a dip about twelve inches in diameter in the centre, marked with the words:

STAND HERE

With his left hand, Anakin could feel a very slight vibration in the square.

“It’s a pressure sensor,” he realised aloud. “One of us stands here and…” he waved his hand, rising to his feet again, “… something happens.”

“You want to find out what that might be?” asked Luke, with forced cheerfulness.

Anakin considered for a moment whether it was more likely the one standing on it would open up a trap door sending the other hurtling towards their death or activate a laser that would incinerate whoever was standing on the platform.

But those were ideas taken out of bad action flicks. He’d spent enough time here to know Silent Hill wasn’t like that.

He stepped up onto the platform.

There was a loud click coming from the mirror, and the wall changed in an instant from reflective to transparent, revealing a second room on the other side of the glass.

A moment later, the section of the shield blocking the door between them dropped.

Then, the door slid open.

Luke made for it, but Anakin stepped off the platform at once, and the door shut, followed swiftly by the shield re-activating. He couldn’t help but smile, more of a grimace though it was.

_How did they know there’d be two of us?_

A memory of a voice that sounded like Obi-Wan’s suggested, _the Rule of Two, perhaps?_

“Well, that’s great,” said Luke sarcastically.

The one thing that hadn’t gone back to how it had been before Anakin had stepped on the platform was that the mirror stayed transparent and they could see through to the next room. Anakin guessed that feature was on a timer or something.

When he looked through the glass he saw a door in the far wall, a piece of scrap paper nailed to the same wall a couple of metres away from it, and a row of six empty restraint fields, switched off, sitting precisely opposite the six in the room they were in.

“I think I see what it means by ‘stand before the sinless one’,” Anakin announced.

Another glance and Luke seemed to get it too, nodding. “But who _is_ the sinless one?”

“Bet that piece of paper tells us,” said Anakin. “You want to hop on?” He gestured toward the platform.

Luke raised his eyebrows in a way that reminded him enough of Obi-Wan that he had to push down a pang of bitter pain. “You mean, I stay in here where it’s safe enough, while you go in there and make the choice as to who you’re going to stand in front of?”

Both of them had realised that someone was going to have to actually stand on the restraint field in question in order to fulfil this bizarre challenge.

“Yep,” Anakin told him.

“You do realise that if we choose wrong and you get electrocuted to a crisp, I’ll be trapped down here forever and suffer a slow, lingering death?”

“I guess we won’t choose wrong then,” Anakin said, smirking.

He was of the opinion that if he did die here, Vader would come for Luke soon enough. It was near the bottom of the list of ‘things he wanted to happen’, but he believed Vader would at least take Luke out of this place, where he might have the chance of escaping on his own.

Luke must have realised there was no way he was going to get Anakin to take the lesser risk in this endeavour, and with a frustrated sigh he stormed over to the platform and stood on it. Anakin waited for the shield to drop and walked into the adjacent room forthwith.

The smell of burning was no less strong in this one, but he could still see Luke through the transparent wall.

He proceeded to the scrap of paper and tore it away, taking it to the divide so he and Luke could both read from it. Luke stepped off the platform to join him, the door between them shutting ominously.

“So,” Luke asked, “What have we got?”

They peered in at the paper, and the verses neatly written upon it, with Anakin reading aloud:

_Dead men, dead men, hanging in a row;  
Why should they be made dead men, though?  
Brought at last to what they’ve earned;  
Watch them as they smoke and burn!_

_The first man, travelling from afar;  
Too many drinks took from the bar.  
When at cards the barman did him best,  
He shot an arrow through his chest._

_Next, an officer quite dense;  
For one crime had no evidence.  
His suspect he placed ‘neath a wheel,  
And broke his legs until he squealed._

_The third, a knight, always boasting;  
That soberly he’d guard his king.  
But old king’s castle was burned down,  
When knight was drinking out of town._

_A prison’s warden, number four;  
Knew what good his inmates were for.  
In ice-mines deep, they toiled cold,  
While warden’s pockets lined with gold._

_The fifth, his son he saw one day,  
Run down a child and speed away.  
However, when before the court;  
Said he’d seen nothing of the sort._

_The last, refusing a queen’s favours,  
Was served drink of unusual flavour.  
The next morn, dazed, his wife found him,  
In that queen’s bed – and turned him in._

_Dead men, dead men, hanging in a row;  
Why should they be made dead men, though?  
As lightning flows into their bones;  
Listen to them scream and groan!_

Anakin finished reading in a dry tone: the hand holding the paper dropping to his side.

“Well,” he said.

“That about sums it up,” agreed Luke.

After a long exhale that made Anakin’s vision swim – had it been three days now, since he’d eaten? How was he still moving…? – he looked from paper to the six corpses behind the ray shield, shaking his head.

“They’re not in the right order,” he muttered.

“I think we go by the poem and the medals,” said Luke. “Not the order they’re hanging in.”

“Agreed,” said Anakin. “Okay, let’s go through the list. First guy – shot an arrow through a guy’s chest for beating him at cards. Seems pretty cut and dry.”

“So that’s the murderer,” said Luke. “Assuming we believe the poem.”

“I think we have to,” said Anakin. “Second guy…”

Luke looked behind himself, at the corpses. “Broke a man’s legs to try and get him to confess to a crime. Torture.”

He gestured to the man second from the platform end of the room.

“Number three, a knight who failed his king because he went AWOL.”

“The oath-breaker,” Luke declared. “On the torturer’s left.”

Anakin didn’t re-read the next verse, even to paraphrase it. _In ice-mines deep, they toiled cold_ …

“Mr. Slaver was next to the murderer, right?” he asked.

They all looked eerily alike from here. Tall, lithe and strongly built. Then again, for all he knew they were only props.

(he knew they weren’t)

“Yep,” said Luke. “He’s number four. Then the perjurer at the other end of the row.”

“Said he hadn’t seen his son run over a kid, even though he had.”

Tilting his head, Anakin re-read the verse.

“Is he really a ‘sinner’, if he’s protecting his child?” he wondered.

“Well, yeah…” said Luke, without hesitation. “I mean... I guess I can _understand_ why he’d do it… but it’s still lying to protect a killer.”

He was giving Anakin a strange look, and Anakin felt his face heat up uncomfortably. He moved along quickly.

“And then six – the guy who got drunk and cheated on his wife. Is he supposed to be ‘sinless’ because he was under the influence?”

Luke leant in and frowned. “Can you read out the verse again?”

“ ‘The last… _refusing_ a queen’s favours… served drink of _unusual_ flavour… oh.”

“So he was drugged,” said Luke. “He’s ‘dazed’ when he wakes up later.”

“Right. She drugged him and took him to bed against his will.”

Anakin paused.

His face was still getting hotter.

“So… _he’s_ the sinless one? The adulterer?”

“Because he was executed for the crime of adultery,” said Luke, “but he wasn’t actually to blame – it must be him. All the others willingly committed the crimes they were accused of.”

Something seemed off though, about that conclusion. That the adulterer was the sinless one, and not the perjurer. He wasn’t sure if it was the Force – no, it wasn’t the Force, that thin thread of Force he could still feel thrummed towards the obvious choice – but there was something inside him that felt like…

That felt like…

“Anakin? Are you okay?”

Anakin backed away from the shield on unsteady feet. “ ‘m fine,” he muttered. “Just tired.”

If he did go and stand in the restraint opposite the perjurer, what would happen? It was probably the wrong answer, and he’d get himself killed and Luke stranded – Jesse too, but…

He was trying to protect his son. Even if the son wasn’t noble, the father was – wasn’t he?

_Anakin._

Like he was in the room with him, or speaking through the Force, what sounded like his name in Obi-Wan’s voice was suddenly in his head, admonishing.

He knew what Obi-Wan would say if he was here.

_Anakin, both knowledge and the Force lead towards the adulterer in this case. Must you be stubborn?_

_Have my teachings meant nothing to you?_

_Have I meant nothing to you?_

Anakin closed his eyes.

_Master._

With a deep breath, he pulled himself away from the restraint opposite the perjurer and toward the third one from the end.

“Anakin…” Luke said again.

“Here goes nothing,” he called back, and before he could think any more about it he jumped up onto the field emitter.

The various light sources in the room flickered, and the restraining field activated, pulling Anakin’s body into the correct position: arms up and spread to his sides as he was illuminated in its cone of inclusion.

A _clunk, clunk, clunk_ in the ceiling and walls around them told him something was going on in both rooms, and with a low whirring noise the light of the ‘adulterer’s own restraint field began to flash – lighter and then dimmer, but never turning off.

Then there was a crackle of electricity above Anakin’s head.

“Anakin…” said Luke, cautiously. Somehow it felt weird, for Luke to call him by his name, but he didn’t know –

With a jolt, one of the higher settings was activated, and Anakin felt a brief tingling sensation in his left hand and a worrying vibration in his right before the familiar stab of a painful electric shock spreading through his arms and down his spine.

_Great. We were wrong after all and now I’m going to die like the idiot I am._

He let out a pained cry and jerked against the field.

“Anakin!” Luke shouted.

But the shock only lasted a few seconds.

A series of loud click, click, clicks in the wall and both the restraining field holding Anakin and the one holding the man labelled ‘adulterer’ deactivated, sending them both tumbling to the floor.

Almost like Silent Hill was telling him, ‘Just kidding’.

Anakin landed on his right arm with an impact that knocked the wind out of him and made the pain in the join flare up, waxing and waning thereafter as bad as he’d ever felt it while he leant on his left elbow, on his knees, waiting for the nausea to pass.

Behind him, the grid shield over the door to whatever was beyond deactivated.

Behind Luke, the grid shield over the last door in the other room also disappeared.

There were two, almost simultaneous ‘clinking’ noises as something dropped from the ceilings of both rooms onto the two, recently vacated restraining fields.

However, the ray-grid shield combo between them remained up and running.

_Asshole_ , thought Anakin, as he expelled the bile in his stomach onto the metal tiles. _Whoever you are, whyever you’re doing this to us, you’re a fucking asshole._

Luke flinched in the next room, looking away – Anakin couldn’t see him, but he could tell he was doing it. Poor kid must have realised that there was nothing he could do to help Anakin on that side of the mirror, but he waited as close to the shield as he could instead of investigating whatever had dropped from the ceiling.

Anakin was in a sorry state, but since he wasn’t dead yet he managed to gather together a drop of optimism, and fumbled for the canteen at his belt. He took a small sip and swilled in around his mouth before spitting it out in order to replace the taste of bile with the slightly less disgusting taste of water purification tablet, then took another sip and swallowed.

“I’m okay,” he choked out. “I’m okay.” He could feel a processor in his right arm rebooting, and with another small whir and a vibration he was able to move it again.

“Hang on,” Luke told him, “I’ll open the door again – you come back over to this side!”

He rushed to the pressure sensor too fast to see Anakin shake his head, and to no surprise when he stood on the white square this time, nothing happened.

“Come on…” Luke muttered with frustration. He jumped up and down on the platform to no avail. “Come on!”

“No use,” Anakin gasped. “One of the relays must have fried. Probably by design – they want to separate us. You feel it, don’t you?”

Luke stilled. With a deep exhale he stepped off the sensor again, while Anakin took another sip of water.

“This place,” Anakin continued tiredly. “There really is something wrong with it. Not just Vader, but the town itself. They did something here, something that…” he trailed off, having no conclusion in his head that could make sense out of the clues he had been given and the feeling that was in his heart. There was just not enough to go on to explain this degree of insanity. “What was it that fell?”

Reluctantly, Luke hurried back to the ‘adulterer’s restraint, and as Anakin staggered to his feet, releasing the ensuing dizziness into the Force as best he could, Luke retrieved what had fallen from the ceiling on his side.

“It’s a token of some kind,” he called back. “I found one like it earlier. This one says ‘The Peace-Bringer’.”

The Peace-Bringer… Anakin frowned and turned around, quickly spotting a rectangular slip of metal at the side of the restraint field that had shocked him. It was the same size and shape as the one he’d been presented with when he’d first come into the Research Station, only with blue lines instead of black decorating it, and it read:

**THE STAR  
PILOT**

_The Star Pilot and The Peace Bringer_. Sounded like a pretentious novel he could stick next to ‘The Winds of Freedom’ on his shelf at home.

“Is your one the same?” asked Luke.

Anakin held the token up. “Says ‘The Star Pilot’.”

“That’s the same as the first one I got,” Luke told him, fishing a near-identical slip out of the pouch on his belt.

“And I had this one,” said Anakin, retrieving his ‘Peace-Bringer’ token.

A close examination of the two through the glass revealed there were some slight differences in the configuration of the lines, and Anakin’s ‘Star Pilot’ token had a darker shade of blue than Luke’s. Remembering the spines of the books in the med centre activities room, Anakin and Luke tried lining their tokens up in different combinations for a short while in case the decorative lines were more than just decorative.

However, if they were, then there were obviously more tokens to find before the nature of the pattern would reveal itself.

This left the two of them on opposite sides of a very literal divide. Luke pushed a ration bar through the gaps in the grid shield with as stern a look as his baby-face could muster through the mask.

“I have loads,” he said casually. “And you look like you’re about to fall over dead. If you’re not careful, next time we come across something dangerous you’ll be too weak to throw yourself into it.”

Anakin rolled his eyes and laughed at the same time. But he accepted the small bar.

“I have something for you too,” he said. Luke cocked his head.

“You already gave me your most powerful weapon,” he pointed out, patting the rifle that was slung over his shoulder.

“No, I didn’t,” said Anakin.

The red saber he’d picked up in Vader’s little hideaway still weighed as heavily as ever. So far it hadn’t stuttered or seemed ready to give out once, and though he hated using a Darksider’s blade, Anakin didn’t need two sabers.

“I don’t know if this one will work for you,” he said, unclipping his own, blue lightsaber.

_This weapon is your life._

“ – but I want you to have it.”

Luke stared wide-eyed. It had been a while since Anakin had gotten him to do that, and it brought a hint of a smile to his face.

“What?! Anakin, I can’t take your – “

“It’s worked against Vader once before,” Anakin interrupted. “The other time… well, let’s just say it’s unreliable. But I’d feel a lot better if you had something to defend yourself with if you do run into him again and it’s better than a rifle by far.”

“But – “

“It’s not like I don’t have a spare,” Anakin reminded him.

He manoeuvred it carefully through a gap in the grid – and since this was a dangerous thing to do Luke was less hesitant to take it than he might otherwise have been.

As soon as his fingers closed around it, that small thread of the Force pulsed. For a moment it was more like a ribbon than a thread, a ribbon of all colours snaking along Anakin’s arm, the hilt of his saber, and then Luke’s arm – tying the three of them together. The pulse only dissipated when Anakin released his hold, and the two men looked at each other in shock.

“You felt that?” Luke asked.

“Yeah,” said Anakin.

Yesterday he’d scoffed at the idea that he could have a strong connection through the Force with Luke after only a day or two of knowing him, but now he wasn’t so sure. There was something about Luke – how he’d happened to come here at exactly the same time as Anakin, his connection to Vader and to the Jedi that made Anakin feel that he too was somehow important in the course of whatever destiny the Force was pulling him towards. And perhaps that importance was strong enough that to some degree time itself – in this place that was apparently a Force ‘wellspring’, if a poisoned one – was bending to bring a future connection to the forefront. Like a vision, constantly in the back if his head.

“Anakin…” Luke said, the saber resting in both his hands, “That thing I told you about before – about me forgetting something important... it’s weird, but when I’m holding this lightsaber it’s like… it’s almost there. On the tip of my tongue but I just can’t quite…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Anakin told him. “It’ll come to you. You can’t just keep grasping at it – it’ll come when you let go of your need to chase it.”

He was just repeating things Obi-Wan had told him. Luke smiled, though.

“You sound a bit like someone I know,” he said.

“Yeah, well, you can tell me all about them next time.”

There’d be a next time. He hoped. The thin, fragmented presence of the Force seemed to tell him so.

Luke met his eyes with a meaningful look.

“May the Force be with you, Anakin.”

“May the Force be with you.”

The two of them went through the separate doorways.

*~*~*~*

As Anakin moved down the next corridor, alone, that scraggly little rope still tethering him to his normal perception of the Force started to unravel.

There was nothing that could be done about it – he checked the lightsaber and that still seemed to work perfectly well, but he could feel this brief reprieve from the emptiness that had set his mind crawling since he stepped into Silent Hill was coming to an end.

It was somewhat confusing. He’d assumed for the past couple of hours that he’d gotten far down enough as to be moving out of range of whatever the device or corruption was that was blocking his senses, but now he’d either circled around and moved into its sphere of influence again, or it didn’t work like that in the first place.

And he was sure he hadn’t circled back towards where they’d started from. He’d been keeping track of the map Luke had been drawing, the placement of the twisting corridors – they’d been moving further away from town, not closer. In fact, Anakin suspected they were actually beneath the lake.

Luke…

As the Force so far as he could sense it whittled down to a hair’s worth, he could feel his anxiety increase. There was no way to get back through those shields, of course, but his confidence in letting the kid just go off on his own that had so quickly come was now quickly draining out of him.

_Vader doesn’t want him dead_ , he told himself. _Worse than dead, yes, but as long as he is alive there’s still a chance –_

Anakin’s train of thought was swiftly derailed as he turned the next corner. There had been no turns or side doors along this path, and it came to a dead end only ten metres or so away – but there was something there at the end of the hall.

A black hole in the floor.

Switching his flashlight back on, Anakin looked for a sign of what was below, and found none. His light didn’t travel that far – it was just like the pit they’d jumped down to get here.

Again, it was the only way forward. There was nothing else for it.

Anakin jumped.

The thread snapped.

_Anakin opened his eyes._

_The room was dim, with only moonlight coming in from the window behind him. A small, red ‘stand-by’ light on a machine that had been left on._

_Anakin was lying on a bed, beneath a sheet, and when he moved slightly he realised he was naked. He was… he had been here before, hadn’t he?_

_It was warm – too warm._

_Hot._

_Hot, and difficult to move. There was something all around him that…_

_“Are you awake, Anakin?”_

_Obi-Wan._

Right, _he thought, as a sense of the uncanny began to creep in._ It must have all just been a dream.

_Obi-Wan was here, now. Speaking to him. All around him… holding him._

_They were naked, in bed, together. Anakin could feel his master’s bare chest against his back. One leg slung over his and an arm around his torso, hand against his heart. He felt so…_

Strong _._

_“… Master?”_

_He knew, on one level, that something wasn’t right about him and Obi-Wan being naked in bed together._

_It just didn’t seem to matter in that moment._

_In that one, solitary moment, everything was as close to fine as it was ever going to get._

_“You are, good. Now we can begin.”_

_And with that, Anakin heard the sound of wires and metal snapping in his right arm, and Obi-Wan’s hand slid away from his chest to grab the prosthetic and rip it away, throwing it to the other side of the room._

_It hit the wall with a clatter. Anakin blinked._

_That… was not supposed to happen._

_“Master…?”_

_“Yes, Anakin?”_

_“My – my arm, I – “_

_He tried to turn back around, to reach for it with his left to see if what he thought had just happened had actually happened, because it seemed so absurd and yet –_

_“Shh,” Obi-Wan told him._

_He kissed Anakin’s shoulder and turned him so that he was lying face up. He couldn’t have moved on his own – only when Obi-Wan positioned him._

_“Don’t worry, dear one. It won’t take long.”_

_“I – “_

_There was a thin, sliver of ice-cold pain just above the elbow of his left arm, in the room that was still so hot. He could feel… No, that couldn’t be right…_

_Obi-Wan pulled his left arm away from where he’d severed it and dropped it over the side of the bed. Anakin whimpered, a feeling of terror coming into his chest like a cloud of black smoke. He looked up into Obi-Wan’s eyes only to see them look lovingly back at him, grey-blue and clear as ever._

_“M – Master?”_

_“I’m afraid I have to, Anakin. You know what you’ve done.”_

_Now that he thought about it, hadn’t there been a reason for this?_

_He’d done something awful, hadn’t he?_

_“You can’t have these anymore,” Obi-Wan informed him, running his hand over Anakin’s thighs – a gentle admonishment._

_Then he flicked his wrist, and both of Anakin’s legs were sliced away._

_Some part of Anakin’s mind was reminding him –_ it’s all right, you can get prosthetics instead, it’ll be fine _– even as he started to hyperventilate, feeling like there was an explanation for all this but it was one he just couldn’t quite remember._

_“You know why,” Obi-Wan murmured, leaning in towards him. “Don’t you?”_

_Anakin nodded, even though he didn’t. Obi-Wan’s lips touched his hip, softer than down and hotter than lava as Anakin lay there, immobilised, and he began to leave a winding trail of kisses all over his torso, rolling his nipple around in his mouth and making Anakin whine through the agony._

_It was agony, now. Every patch of skin where Obi-Wan left a kiss burst into flame and that fire spread, all over him, even from his own mouth as Obi-Wan kissed him there too._

There’s nothing that can fix _this, he thought helplessly, his skin bubbling and falling off his body._ He’s going to kill me.

… one is led to wonder what, exactly, has kept this man alive for the past twenty years?...

_“Anakin?” Obi-Wan said softly, brushing his fingertips through Anakin’s hair and burning it away. “Anakin, why did you make me do this to you?”_

_Anakin tried to open his mouth to apologise, to beg forgiveness, but it hurt too much to move his charred lips._

_Not even when a red light suddenly burst into the room behind Obi-Wan, leaving a familiar hum and illuminating –_

_Vader._

_It was Vader’s saber._

_Vader had been in the room the whole time._

Master, _Anakin tried to yell in his mind._ Master look behind you, quickly, Master!

_Obi-Wan just smiled._

_Vader lunged forward without hesitation, thrusting the blade through Obi-Wan’s chest and pulling him back with it, tossing him to the side of the room like trash while Anakin screamed and tried in vain to move. He felt the bond between them rip open in the Force and the icy flow of separation trickling through the inferno in his body._

_Then Vader stood back and waited, just staring at him._

_“Anakin, my boy – is that the time?”_

_Chancellor Palpatine was sitting in a chair next to the bed. Had he been there the whole time too?_

_But… this was dangerous – the Chancellor couldn’t be in the same room as the Sith Master!_

_“Goodness me,” said Palpatine, apparently not noticing a single thing off about this situation. “We should be getting ready to send you back.”_

_He leaned in, the light of good humour Anakin was used to from him as bright as ever in his eyes._

_“But before you go I don’t mind telling you how excited I am for the new arrival – and I hope you are too, Anakin.”_

_Glancing away briefly, he checked some kind of chronometer._

_“We’re very nearly at your due date, aren’t we?”_

Chancellor… what is going on…

Please…

Chancellor…

_Palpatine grinned._

_“I’ve already thought of a name.”_

Anakin woke up on a damp, stone floor in near total darkness. A tiny ray of light was running along the floor from his chest.

_Flashlight,_ he thought. _Sit up, you idiot, it’s no good to you if you’re lying on top of it._

Struggling, disoriented, Anakin pushed himself up. There was nothing but darkness above him and his flashlight illuminated only a few levels of stone wall upwards, so the drop had been no shorter than any of his previous descents. On the other hand, he wasn’t in any more pain than before, so something must have interfered with his fall after he lost that last piece of the Force.

There was a single corridor leading out from the bare, stone space he’d found himself in. Before he tried this latest path he found himself trying to make sense of the dream he’d had prior to finding himself here.

All that stuff with Obi-Wan and Vader and Palpatine – why had he… ?

He shook his head. There was no reason for Palpatine of all people to show up there. It was just a regular dream, his mind trying to sort out all the crap in his head and making it worse than ever. It didn’t mean anything, it wasn’t a Force vision.

Why though, he wondered, had he been so sure in the dream that it all made sense?

_You should eat something_.

Any number of people might have told him so if they’d been there. He took the rations from Luke and Jesse and held them side by side. The one with an unfamiliar symbol on it, the other your standard fare.

… maybe he’d hang on to what Luke gave him a little while longer. A memento, of sorts.

After chewing through the bland crap from the transport and washing it down with some purified water – running low already, he’d have to see if he could find more – Anakin began the trek down this latest part of the labyrinth.

The stone walls – built of roughly cut blocks and damp with trickling water – were an eerie atmosphere to come into after level upon level of metal. It made it seem like this part of the complex was much older than the rest, when as the lowest so far it should have been built more recently than the ones that had come before it. It wasn’t that the stone seemed unsound, though suspecting he was indeed beneath the lake the multiple leaks were not exactly reassuring, but he didn’t understand why the Sith would have suddenly switched up their method of construction.

He came to a fork in the path a few metres down, walking in complete silence but for the distant sound of water – and found a sign saying:

**THIS WAY**

Beneath the words was an arrow, pointing down.

_Fuck off_ , thought Anakin. At random, he went right first.

The right path went on for another fifty metres before turning right again for another forty, ending there with a single door. The door had no field emitter shielding it, nor any kind of visible locking mechanism – only an old pull-down handle. It stood to reason Anakin would be able to open it without trouble.

He hesitated. His communicator was quiet, but the static didn’t always activate on the other side of a closed door, and just to be on the safe side Anakin switched from flashlight to red saber for illumination before closing his left hand around the handle and pushing it down and forward.

The door swung away from the frame, inviting Anakin over the threshold and into a black room.

Black was the only way to describe it. The red light didn’t penetrate far, not that of the saber, nor of the other red light that was in the room. On his right, in the blackness, was a cage. The cage was one of energy rather than metal – crimson streams of electricity filling the room with an intense heat, emitted from beneath the floor, above the ceiling and beyond the boundaries of the walls to make the emitters too difficult for someone from the outside to damage.

Inside this cage, that looked like it was made from Dark Side lightsaber blades, was a single metal folding chair.

Sitting on the chair, right ankle resting on his left knee, was Obi-Wan – who greeted his arrival with a raised eyebrow.

“Ah, there you are, Anakin. I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.”

*~*~*~*~*

Anakin blinked and stared.

In his head, the word _no, no, no, no, no_ , kept repeating itself without variation, but his mouth moved of its own accord as he staggered step by step into the centre of the room.

“… Obi-Wan…?”

In his head, Obi-Wan was cut in half by Vader’s blade; over, and over, and over.

“Well, it’s not Jabba the Hutt, that’s for sure,” said Obi-Wan lightly, brushing some imaginary dust off of his sleeves.

It was exactly how he’d have expected Obi-Wan to react upon being rescued from imprisonment by his former Padawan, but it made no sense.

Obi-Wan was dead. Anakin had seen him die – and not like he had when it had been faked for the Hardeen Op either, what he’d seen… what he’d seen couldn’t have been faked.

Anakin couldn’t think. His legs were shaking. His lips moved, mumbling,

“Obi-Wan… I don’t understand – I… I saw Vader _kill you_!”

“Kill me?” Obi-Wan repeated, seemingly unfazed. “What in the world are you talking about, Anakin?”

Was this really Obi-Wan? It couldn’t be – could it?

But then, he was right there. Obviously Anakin couldn’t feel his presence in the Force, but his mannerisms, his speech patterns… they couldn’t be simulated this well, even if it were possible to copy his voice and appearance.

Without warning, Anakin’s knees gave out and he found himself tumbling to the floor, the red saber switching off as he landed. He stared up in disbelief at Obi-Wan – his red robes paler than before; he must have changed them, or maybe it was just the light – only red. He couldn’t see the blue in his Master’s eyes at all in this light, and his pale skin glowed a strange, vermillion colour.

“Vader…” Anakin said, trying to make sense of it, “… in the hallway before the elevator… he pulled you back with the Force and I couldn’t get the doors open – his blade went right through you, I saw it!”

“Vader did what?” Obi-Wan asked with a small laugh.

Then he paused, head tilting slightly, and he looked at Anakin more intently, his eyes…

Anakin’s vision went just a little fuzzy. The sound in the room changed.

“Anakin…” Obi-Wan asked him softly, “Did something happen after we were separated in the Med Centre basement? Did you have a bad dream, perhaps?”

A bad… dream.

That couldn’t be it. He _had_ passed out in the elevator, but that had only been after… hadn’t it?

And yet, here was Obi-Wan, dismissing the idea out of hand.

“Anakin,” Obi-Wan laughed. “You’ve always been so prone to thinking the worst will happen. Remember when you were young and you were about to meet with the Supreme Chancellor for the very first time?”

He chuckled. The lights of the cage bars seemed to glow brighter, and Anakin’s eyes stung with tears.

“You were so nervous. I’m sure you thought he would have you thrown into a dungeon as soon as you put a single toe out of line.”

A pause.

“But he became one of your closest friends in the end, didn’t he? Every time I came to collect you from his office you were grinning from ear to ear.”

Heartbeat.

“I wonder what the two of you were talking about, all those times…”

“Master…” Anakin whispered. “Is it… is it really you?”

“Of course it is,” said Obi-Wan.

He was casual at first, but then his head cocked the other way and his eyes narrowed, like he’d picked up on something he didn’t like, and suddenly he seemed to become much colder.

“Why?” he asked. “You don’t have any _other_ Masters I should know about, do you?”

_… what?_

Anakin didn’t understand. It shouldn’t have been so difficult for him to do so, he knew all the terms that made up the question, and they were quite simple, but somehow his head couldn’t wrap itself around the meaning of it.

“I… no?” he said, but it came out as more of a question in itself.

However, Obi-Wan smiled genially again.

“Good. Then I’m your Master. Or do you still doubt that?”

Anakin shook his head. He wanted _so badly_ to believe, but his memories of events…

“I… I don’t think so, but Master – I can’t feel the Force!”

“Well, neither can I at the moment,” Obi-Wan sighed. “But we _are_ Jedi, Anakin. Please try to act like it.”

Right.

Act like a Jedi. Of course.

It appeared Obi-Wan was even acting more like usual than he had been since the head wound. Anakin rubbed his eyes and forced himself to stand on shaking legs. It was hard, but this reality was so much better than the one that had been on the other side of that door that he felt he needed to do everything in his power to keep this the real one, and if that meant making everything business as usual, then so be it.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I’m sorry, I just…” he took a deep breath. “How do I get you out of there, Master?”

“I thought you were never going to ask. From what I can tell, that door –“ he nodded to Anakin’s left, where if he peered hard he could just about make out the outline of a door in the darkness, “is our way out of here, but unlocking it and deactivating this cage is done from a control room elsewhere in the compound. I’m afraid you’re going to have to go back the way you came and find it.”

That didn’t seem difficult. Get to control room, switch off cage, unlock door, get himself and Obi-Wan out of here.

“Okay,” he said – almost breathless, but his heartrate was going down from the million or so beats per minute it had felt like previously. “Okay, I think I know where to go. You just hang on, Master, I’ll be back for you.”

He stumbled back towards the door.

“Do be quick about it, Padawan,” said Obi-Wan airily. “Even I get bored of meditation after a while. Especially all on my own.”

Anakin turned back to look at him as he spoke. His master seemed oddly… smug, about something, but he couldn’t figure it out. There was no reason to figure it out.

Obi-Wan was alive.

That was all that mattered.

*~*~*~*

Anakin ran.

Back down the corridor to the ‘THIS WAY’ sign and straight ahead, he ran at a steady pace.

_Get to the control room_ , he thought. _Get Obi-Wan out. Get back to Jesse and help with the repairs until the transport can get us away from this place._

No… no, he had to get Luke too.

_Get Luke and go to the transport. Get all of them away from this place._

Obi-Wan was alive.

He was _alive_.

Not just alive, but he was fine – his head wound didn’t seem to be bothering him at all. Everything was going to be okay if Anakin could just hold it together and find the way out. There had to be an elevator or staircase – heck, even a kriffing rope they could use to climb back up to the surface; how else had anyone who’d come down this far ever got back up again?

They’d get back up, he told himself. They’d get back to the surface, fight through as many of the experiments as they needed to get back to the transport and then they’d get to another part of the planet. Away from Maul, Jesse’s head would clear up, and they’d send for help with a local transmitter.

If there was no transmitter on the planet, Anakin would just build one – they had probably everything they needed. A Republic ship would come and pick them up, and take them back to the Temple. He’d make his report to the Council – the thing that had, hours ago, filled him with nothing but dread. It now filled him with hope, hope of seeing the Temple and the Jedi Council again – even _Windu_ , the grim bastard.

And then all this would just be a story to tell to Padme, to Chancellor Palpatine – to Ahsoka, when he finally got to see her again. The war would be over soon, and then…

_Focus on the moment._

At that moment there was a right turn coming up, and a short stretch toward yet another pit in the floor. Thankfully this one had a ladder; he climbed down and into a less developed network – earthen walls and puddles in the damp floor. There had been no other turns on the level above, so this had to be the way forward.

Then, in the distance, he heard a scream.

It was too far away for him to make out much – a male voice, maybe, but even that he couldn’t tell. Obi-Wan was trapped behind him, but it definitely wasn’t Vader or one of the experiments, so he ran towards it.

There was some machinery this far down, it turned out. As he ran around the first corner he entered a large, cavernous space with a wall of purple energy bars running right down the centre. On one side of the bars there were three pathways he couldn’t get to, on his side there were two, not counting the one he’d come in from.

No way to tell where the scream had come from, but he did hear footsteps – someone running toward him from the other side of the –

“Anakin!”

Luke.

That was definitely Luke’s voice.

“Luke!” he called back.

Luke came in from the other side of the bars, the path that was closest to the one he himself had come from. He was no longer wearing the respirator, but otherwise he seemed fine.

Before Anakin could chastise him for taking it off, they heard the scream again.

Both their heads turned towards it. This time it was closer, and Anakin could hear the pain and terror in the desperate cry echoing off the walls.

He could also recognise the voice making it, and apparently so could Luke.

“That sounds like Maul,” he said.

_Good,_ thought Anakin. _Probably getting what he deserves_.

But Luke did not concur.

“It’s coming from your side,” he said. “Down that path there. You should go help him, I’ll see if I can find a way around.”

Anakin looked at him sharply.

“Help him?” he repeated.

“Well, he’s in trouble, isn’t he?!” Luke exclaimed. “I know you two are enemies, but – “

“Enemies?” Anakin parroted. “Kid, you don’t know anything about that _monster_. If Vader or whatever else is down here is finishing him off then all the better! The galaxy will be a safer place without him.”

Luke stared at him, and the look on his face… Anakin regretted what he’d said immediately.

It took the kid a long moment to come up with a response, and when he did all he could manage was,

“But… but you’re a _Jedi_ …”

Anakin stared into his eyes for a long moment. They were giving him no quarter, and he couldn’t…

There was another scream.

“All right,” said Anakin heavily. “All right. I’ll see what I can do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wellp, I guess Obi-Wan was fine after all, yay!
> 
> Will Anakin save Maul next week? What would that sequence of events even look like, I wonder? Hmm…
> 
> Anakin: Look, Maul – I’m only saving you because my kouhai asked me to – it’s, it’s not like I like you or anything, b-baka!  
> Maul: 0_0


	17. Abstract Master

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, everyone! I'm a little late tonight, but I'm sure it's still Saturday for most of you!
> 
> In this chapter, Anakin fights a boss, has another productive chat with his ole' pal Maul, listens to an ancient answerphone and then... well, you'll see. Meanwhile, those of my readers who know the Silent Hill franchise as a whole probably begin to realise at this point, if they haven't already, who 'Phanti', 'Zeall', 'Olore' and 'Caden' really are.
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who gets this far - your support means a lot, and your comments are all very welcome. Enjoy! :D
> 
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

As he raced down the long tunnel following the sound of screaming Anakin reminded himself that Maul could have had useful information that he might, just _might_ share with him if Anakin was in time to save his worthless hide. Maul was, after all, the one who had brought them here in the first place.

And if Anakin wasn’t in time to save his worthless hide, then too bad for him.

At the end of the next turn was a plain set of sliding doors. They had no locking or opening mechanism that Anakin could see, but as he ran toward them they opened of their own accord, leading him into a large room with weird, orange lighting and a metal floor.

This floor was covered in wide holes leading down into black pits, which Anakin had the feeling were not as safe to fall into as others he’d come across previously. However, they weren’t his immediate concern.

“No… no, no – Master, _please!_ ”

Maul was huddled in the far-left corner of the room, looking much the worse for wear. Blood was running down from several horns and the arms he had wrapped around his head to try and protect it were littered with cuts Anakin could see clearly through torn sleeves. One of his legs was twitching – sparks flying, clearly damaged.

But Maul wasn’t his immediate concern either.

Floating in the air between Maul and Anakin was what at first appeared to him to be a detached black shadow. Fluttering oddly, a second look made it seem more fabric-like, but moving in a way that made no sense, like there were multiple winds being blown on it from every direction.

A moment later, a bright shower of Force lightning jetted down from the black shadow toward Maul, and he shrieked in pain at the onslaught.

“Hey!”

Anakin may have hated Maul, or as close to hated him as a Jedi was allowed, but he had no desire to stand back and watch him scream while he was tortured by whatever this thing was. He held up the heavy red saber and extended the blade.

The thing turned around at the sound of his shout and Anakin found himself gazing at the strangest creature he’d seen yet.

It was just _arms_ – a dozen or so of them.

At first glance he couldn’t quite comprehend what he was looking at, nor at second or third for that matter. A ring of arms; long, waxy, pale and bent backward at both elbow and wrist; all tied together at their shoulders with the black cloth that spread out around and behind them. A droid of some sort again – it had to be – devised by an insane person.

And the centre of the circle – about thirty inches across – there was something _off_ with it. He couldn’t see through to the black cloth rippling behind it, but it didn’t look like there was anything _there_ either. It was just an empty, black hole.

The ring spun like a wheel as Anakin tried to explain what he was seeing to himself, and the arms moved. Two on each side swivelled forward, hands pointing towards him. Their palms faced the ceiling and the spindly fingers bent backwards, but it resembled the posture Dooku had always taken before using Force lightning on him, so Anakin jumped to the side.

No lightning came his way in the end, but the ring flew toward him, and as it flew an appalling noise started coming from all around the room. Screeching gears and metal clanking against metal heralded the raising of platforms within the holes in the floor, which Anakin had at first thought were probably just there to drop down to one unpleasant death or another. Now some malfunction was making these stages rise and fall along the shafts at random, sending vibrations through the entire room.

Once it was close, but out of lightsaber range, the ring tried to circle around him. Anakin turned to face it, drawing the old blaster with his left hand and firing four shots in quick succession.

One shot only got the cloak, one struck one of the hands of the creature, and the other two hit two of the arms. Apart from a few flinches, there appeared to be no effect.

_What? How tough is its skin if a kriffing blaster bolt barely scratches it!?_

That line of thought was cut short as the ring decided to swoop down at him that very moment. He side-stepped, and with a single sweep of the red saber he severed five arms in his wake.

Some almost at the shoulder, others barely past the wrist, they fell to the floor with a series of thumps and three rolled off the edges of the elevator shafts and onto the platforms.

This blow seemed so outrageously catastrophic that it actually stunned Anakin that he was able to do it – but that was what the ring had apparently counted on. There was no sign that the thing felt any pain from having almost half its arms cut off, and quick as a flash it had swept around Anakin and grabbed him from behind. Anakin, having expected a delay, was unprepared for this. When he tried to strike behind himself the saber only succeeded in burning through black cloth.

As he felt the six remaining hands of the ring close around him, arms bending forward and backward with sickening cracks to manoeuvre themselves into the best hold, he tried to twist himself out of its grasp. The effort was in vain – two arms held onto his wrists so he couldn’t fight back; cold, oily against his left; two snaked around his chest, one over the shoulder the other beneath the ribs to keep his upper body still; one around his waist, hand on his hip and the last came between his legs and held his left thigh.

“Fuck – get off me!” Anakin snarled, twisting.

The four hands not holding his arms began to move, sliding over his body as if to test him out and then all six released a jolt of Force lightning into him.

Anakin screamed and thrashed harder against their hold. They only kept the charge up for a few seconds, but then they shocked him again for even longer. The pain was intense; little threads of molten steel poking into his flesh at one end and winding through him until they came out elsewhere – and burning him at the end of his right arm.

It was a miracle, but that right arm still moved despite the shock, and just as the arms began to pull him towards the hole in the centre of the ring, Anakin managed to move the hilt of the saber around his hand with enough dexterity to sever the arms around his leg, waist and left arm.

With his left arm free he could fire a blaster bolt straight into the arm holding his own right, and with a careful aim the ones holding his chest also. It took two more shots to make the last two let go but as soon as they did he pulled himself away, swirled around and brought the lightsaber through the last three remaining arms.

“Fuck!” he hissed, the pain still throbbing everywhere, especially at the join of his right arm.

The ring of severed arms retreated and so did Anakin – too far back, it turned out, as he stepped onto one of the platforms just as it began its descent again and had to jump quickly onto the space between shafts to avoid being dragged down into whatever darkness was below.

His right boot left a bloody footprint when he landed, indicating there’d been a pool of blood on the platform.

_Why?_

Well, now wasn’t the time for that question. When the ring floated back into the centre of the room and out of reach, the waving stumps began to reach into the black hole in the centre of the ring. One by one they pulled themselves out again, and one by one they emerged with a new length of arm, backwards bending elbow, and deformed hand attached.

“Great – it regenerates!” Anakin yelled, looking toward Maul as though he might have mentioned this before now.

But Maul still had his hands over his face, cringing like a scared dog in the corner.

_What a waste of space. I can’t believe I’m risking my life for_ that.

There was nothing to be done about it now. Back to ‘perfect’ condition the ring flew at him again, but this time he was prepared. When it tried to circle around, Anakin waited until the last possible second to lull it into a false sense of security – so far as a thing like that might have had ‘senses’.

Once it was within range he struck – drawing his blade across the air in three wide, fast strikes that managed to cut three arms each, leaving only the two at the bottom attached while the others thudded onto the floor one by one.

It backed off too quickly for a fourth strike to take out the remainder, but Anakin leapt after it in a brief switch to Ataru for speed. The switch paid off: two more grey arms dropped into a hole, which Anakin in his momentum was just able to keep himself from tumbling after, balanced precariously on the precipice for a half-second before throwing his weight back to relative safety.

The hesitation meant the ring was able to get out of striking range where it could regenerate again – and it looked like it could, indeed, regenerate again – but Anakin held up his blaster and began firing into the stumps – and, alternately, into the hole in the centre in case that had any effect.

If it did, he didn’t see it. The stumps swivelled into the hole and came out as arms again, while Anakin decided upon a new course of action.

_Cutting off the arms stalls it, but it’s obviously not putting it down any time soon. I’m going to have to try cutting through the ring itself._ Hopefully there was some important circuitry in there that would shut the whole thing down if it was severed.

For a third time the ring flew towards Anakin, and this time he waited until it decided on its angle of attack, then ducked as it reached out for him and side-stepped into a crouch from which he could attack from the side while the arms were extended out towards him. In this way, he managed to drag the lightsaber through all but the one arm at the highest point of the ring before circling around.

Unfortunately he’d circled onto an extended platform, which began to sink before he realised what had happened, and he had to jump forward to grab onto the edge and pull himself back up again.

The ring took this opportunity to come after him with its last arm, spinning to put it closer to the ground so it could grab the back of his neck. A sharp agony followed, electricity racing down his spine, though Anakin was able to cut off a single arm easily enough after only a second or two of the onslaught. However, the ring followed its pattern of immediate retreat forthwith, and Anakin was left to push the disgusting severed limb off his head as he got back to his feet and shook himself off.

More red footprints were left where he walked. As they stood out on the light metal floor Anakin’s eyes were naturally drawn to them, and he noticed that several – not all, about a quarter – of the platforms had what appeared to be blood pooling on them.

_Think about that later_ , he told himself. The ring had regenerated once more.

Staying in a position that didn’t risk stepping onto one of the platforms or worse, straight into a hole, was difficult with the number of holes that were in the room. But, being more aware of that danger now, he managed to duck into a crouch from which he severed all but two of the arms without almost falling in.

He still risked being grabbed by the final two arms, but he considered the risk worthwhile, and swung his blade at the side of the ring itself before the hands could follow his movement.

The lightsaber went right through the ‘shoulder’, but that was where his luck ended. As soon as the blade passed into the black centre, some kind incredible _force_ dragged it forward, almost right out of Anakin’s hand. It was so strong that Anakin was pulled into the ring bodily, flying into the blackness beyond. He held his breath as he waited to come out the other side of the thing’s cloak, but when he hit a solid surface there was nothing but black, everywhere, all around him. All sound of creaking machinery ceased at once.

And he couldn’t breathe.

_What?_

_What the fuck?!_

Anakin’s heartrate exploded as his lungs went from being fine to feeling the pressure of no air in only a few moments. Somehow, on the other side of the ring, within the garment of this ridiculous abomination of the Dark Side, there was a vacuum – and he couldn’t breathe. Switching his flashlight on, he gazed around wildly for an explanation, some kind of escape or course of action.

He was standing on a circle of metal, stained dark red with an expanding pool of blood that was coming from nowhere. And he was moving – up.

At his sides, he could make out a number of enormous, moving cylinders. Some rose, others were sinking, and it came to him that he was standing on top of one himself. Above him –

_Light. Holes in the ceiling – no, the floor. It’s the floor of the room I was just in; somehow going through that ring transported me down here. How!?_

It was impossible – physically and scientifically absurd, and to a ludicrous degree, but realising it didn’t fill his lungs with air. With no way to get up onto one of the higher platforms Anakin realised he was stuck waiting for this one to lift him back into the room. He made a quick judgement regarding the distance and the sluggish rate of the cylinder’s rise.

His chances, he decided, came up as a definite ‘maybe’. Maybe he would reach the top still being both alive and cognisant enough to fight. He couldn’t make it go any faster – he had to do what he could to tough it out.

_Okay. No moving, no panicking. Focus. Focus on staying conscious so you can get off the platform when you reach the top. The Force is blocked from your senses but it is still there – you_ know _it._

_Like the Code says. There is knowledge._

_… Obi-Wan would have liked that conclusion._

His head began to feel lighter.

_Would? He’s alive, remember. Make it to the top and you can tell him all about it._

_Fail, and you fail him too._

The light from above him was getting brighter at the centre, but darker around the edges like the hole was shrinking. It wasn’t, but the illusion remained.

_Just hold on, Chosen One,_ Anakin told himself. _The Force_ is _still with you_.

From one long moment of his chest crushing itself to the next he decided to make his move – jumping as high as he could with all his power to reach the top of the hole and pull himself up. His fingers curled around the corner of that edge and he _pulled._

Air.

He filled his lungs with a great gasp of it as his vision swam, and through the blurriness he saw the ring of arms, with its remaining two arms floating in the centre of the room. It started as though it had somehow heard the noise he made, and flew toward him – hands outstretched.

In that state, it wasn’t difficult for Anakin – even in his state – to cut those final arms off, and he staggered away to get his breath back, still gasping.

But as the feeling in his head swelled from dizziness to pain, he realised something.

_It was hovering over one of the holes, but not the one I came up through – it didn’t know where I was going to be. If I go back down deliberately, prepared this time, I might be able to surprise it when I come back up._

… It was _a_ plan, at any rate.

Anakin forced himself upright, moving to a place from which he could challenge the ring. By this point it was difficult to do so without tripping over arms he’d already severed, and he kicked a few into one of the holes as he got into position. Roughly a third of the platforms now had blood on them, and the ones he had first noticed becoming bloody were almost entirely saturated in red.

This attempt went smoothly – Anakin ducking at the right moment to sweep away all but one of the arms with a single blow without risking a fall into an airless pit. Limbs thumped against the thin floor. The ring with its remaining arm then swung around to face him again, but Anakin didn’t wait any longer, he took a deep breath and dove forward with a straight lunge into the centre.

The vacuum pulled him in once more. The sudden silence was almost worse than the lack of air or darkness.

However, this time he was ready for it, and since breathing exercises were a staple of Jedi training he not only made it to the top without blacking out, he was even able to keep from taking a breath immediately – wanting to avoid potentially tipping the ring off.

Assuming it could hear him breathe. Or ‘hear’ in general, being made out of arms.

Fortunately, he didn’t have to hold his breath much longer – because this time he had come up directly behind the ring, and its cloak of shadows. As soon as he was within striking range, he slashed a diagonal line straight across the back of it.

_Got you!_

And got it, he had. The bottom half fell to the floor immediately, as Anakin sucked in a deep breath, jumping off the platform before it began to descend again.

The top half of the ring that still had an arm attached wobbled in the air and seemed to try and attack him regardless, but when Anakin severed the final arm it too dropped to the ground with a loud clang.

Anakin backed away to recover, panting heavily, and watched as the two halves of the ring spasmed wildly, in what appeared to be its death throes. To his alarm, a crop of new, pale limbs began to sprout from the two halves – but the arms that emerged this time were skeletal, bent like rubber, with hands that looked like they’d melted as they’d formed.

These grotesque appendages flopped about against the metal for a few moments, then became still.

The static on his communicator stopped, and the rising cylinders came to floor level and did not descend again.

Anakin let out a heavy exhale.

Then, before he could really get his bearing, he was startled by an animalistic moan behind him. Having completely forgotten Maul for a minute there, he swivelled around to see him clamber up on his metal legs and twist his hands around the handle of his wood-and-metal axe.

“You can’t be serious,” Anakin gasped.

But Maul wasn’t looking at him at all, only the downed ring of withered arms. He dragged his damaged leg through the blood on one of the circles towards the carnage, and with a deranged snarl he dropped to his knee before it and began bringing the axe down on the limbs with heavy, pain-filled whacks.

Chop.

Chop.

Chop.

The pale lengths of flesh began to split apart. Anakin turned away in disgust only to survey a room littered with bloody circles and dozens of white, severed arms.

_What. The. Fuck._

This monster made no sense. It just didn’t – droid, creature, something in between – nothing could explain its absurd abilities. Even the thought of trying to explain it exhausted him.

And yet, it was not a dream. Anakin knew dreams, and dreams more terrible than this bizarre… _entity_ , and this was not a dream.

Anakin found himself turning back again. Just watching Maul shriek as he brought the axe down over and over on more severed arms. In that moment, he wasn’t sure exactly what he was feeling, but he was reminded of one of his reasons for coming in here in the first place.

“I don’t suppose you,” he choked out at length, “are going to tell me how the hell that thing was even possible?”

With a final enraged cry, Maul stamped on the ring. His legs must have had a self-repair function of their own, and he turned to face Anakin with a glare, breathing no less heavily.

“Don’t order me around!” he growled.

Anakin let out a short gasp of laughter. “Hey. I didn’t _have_ to come in here and save your ass – I’m only stuck in this hellhole because of you anyway, so why don’t you cut the crap and tell me – “

But Maul cut him off with loud, humourless laughter of his own, “Oh, you may have followed me through hyperspace, Skywalker, but _you_ are not in this place because of _me_. That is all on you.”

The difference between those two positions was escaping Anakin at that moment, but ultimately he didn’t really care who Maul thought was at fault for Anakin being there. Rather,

“This place? What. IS. This. Place!? That was instant transportation technology there, since when did the Sith – ”

“Technology!” Maul cried, staring wide-eyed. “Are you still that far behind? Do you think the Sith Lords of old – even _lunatics_ like Phanti – wasted their time creating batches of mindless monsters that can be killed with a single swing of a lightsaber!?”

Anakin froze.

“But… you said… back in the apartment building, you said – “

“I said that this is the result of experiments gone wrong,” spat Maul, “and that was true. What you’ve seen here was certainly not what the Sith wanted from this place.”

“Then what _did_ they want?”

There had been very few clues in that respect so far as Anakin had understood them. The gameshow over the PA system in the Med Centre had said Zeall and Phanti were a breakaway pair – to a lesser or greater extent, they hadn’t been following the way of the Sith of old. But it had been very vague about what their goals, and perhaps Oloré and Caden’s after, had actually been.

The only clues that had seemed to say anything precise about the matter were the recordings he’d found in the lab – or they would have if they hadn’t been so badly degraded. But there had been more than a few snippets of that guy’s words that had rung deafening alarm bells in Anakin’s head. When Maul left a pause, shaking his head from side to side menacingly, Anakin added –

“Does it… have something to do with the Chosen One?”

Maul stopped and met his eyes, a strange look on his face. Then, looking away again and frowning, he replied, “I’m not familiar with the finer points of Jedi prophecies. But I do know Phanti wanted a weapon. A weapon that could destroy both the Jedi _and_ the other Sith.”

_… destroy the Jedi_ and _the Sith…_

Those words stirred something in Anakin’s mind. A kind of déjà vu, maybe; it sent an uncomfortable shudder through his head. But the idea of wanting a weapon that could wipe out both one’s enemies and one’s rivals sounded perfectly in-keeping with a Sith mindset.

“Is the weapon here now?” he asked.

He was surprised that Maul answered, though he left a pause. “Phanti never achieved what she wanted from her research. As I said before, the experiments _did_ go wrong.”

“Right, and that’s where the monsters come from – but how? I can buy that an overload in the Dark Side might affect the creatures in the area. The objects, even, but the stuff I’ve been seeing out there is all more or less uniform to a few models: it doesn’t make sense that they weren’t… _constructed_ that way.”

With an exasperated groan, Maul rolled his eyes. “You’re still looking at this from completely the wrong perspective!” he complained. “Haven’t you given a moment’s thought to what’s been happening here!?”

Anakin bristled at the insult – from kriffing Maul of all people – but it didn’t bring him any closer to understanding anything.

“I haven’t had many spare moments to stop and collect my thoughts, believe it or not!”

“Then think now, I implore you!” Maul shouted. “What could have made this… thing,” he kicked what was left of the ring in disgust, “able to function in the way it did, hmm?”

There was a long pause. Only one thing came to mind, and Anakin shrugged helplessly.

“I… nothing. Nothing could have made it work like that, it makes no sense!”

“Exactly!”

Exactly?

Exactly, it makes no sense?

_How the hell is that an answer!?_

The walls felt close and it was like there were insects beneath Anakin’s skull, scuttling over his brain. He didn’t want this. He didn’t want to go any further down this path.

It shouldn’t have been his responsibility when it wasn’t like he had asked for it.

“Forget it,” he said dully. “What do you know about Vader’s plans for this place?”

Maul snorted at ‘forget it’, but his interest appeared piqued by Anakin’s question.

“Vader?” he repeated, as one hearing the name for the first time.

“Yeah, Darth Vader. Are you saying you don’t know him? He’s not your former master?”

Maul’s eyes narrowed.

“I don’t know that I am acquainted with a ‘Darth Vader’,” he said slowly. “But then, Sith don’t give their true names out to just anyone. It’s possible I do know him… but not by that title.”

“For fuck’s sake,” snarled Anakin. “I suppose you’ll say the same for the other guy…” _what was his name, the one who’d popped up once or twice_? “… Sidious…”

That one made Maul’s breath hitch.

“Where did you hear that name?” he asked.

Anakin shrugged. “Around,” he said. “Now look, I only care about getting myself and my friends back to Republic space so I can deliver what I’ve learned to the Senate. If you want to stay here – “

But Maul had already been spooked back into his earlier, rambling state – “No… did _he_ come here? … did he know what I was… or was it _him_?”

– and Anakin cut himself off, feeling like he’d just hit some kind of mark.

“What is it?” he asked. “Is it Sidious? Is that the name of the guy who’s really behind this whole mess?”

“No more questions,” Maul hissed. “No more… the way out. There’s a way out, you just have to keep hating enough to find it, even _this_ place can’t stop that…”

_Great, he’s crazy again_ , thought Anakin. _Probably should have known better than to expect anything else, but there you go._

Once again, the thought came to him.

_I should just kill him. He’s more than on his ‘last legs’, it’s not like it would be difficult._

But.

_… what would Luke…_

Before he could make a decision, Maul yelled, “No!” much louder than before, racing for the door.

_Damn it!_ Anakin cursed inside his head. Maul was nearer than he was.

“Wait!” he ordered, hurrying after.

Maul did not wait. He cleared the threshold before Anakin could get there and the automatic doors couldn’t interrupt their closing cycle so he had to wait the extra few seconds for them to open again.

As he raced out of the room he was able to just catch a glimpse of Maul further up the tunnel. The only path available led back to the cavern, but Maul was fast. Anakin had to push himself well before he was ready for it. There were two turns Maul could take when he got to that cavern.

_And if he goes back the way I came and finds Obi-Wan still imprisoned…_

The cage would likely protect Obi-Wan from all but a projectile weapon, and Anakin hadn’t seen Maul use one of those yet. But he didn’t want to take that risk.

Fortunately, Maul was still looking between the two tunnels with frantic anxiety by the time Anakin arrived. Luke was nowhere to be seen, which was something of a relief, but Anakin running in, yelling –

“Hey!”

… prompted him to make up his mind.

He picked the unknown path.

Anakin ran after him, but this turned out to be a rather shorter path than he’d expected from this seemingly never-ending labyrinth. It snaked around to the left and back for about a hundred metres in total before coming out onto an outcrop in the centre of an enormous chasm.

Well. Anakin thought it was a chasm. In the darkness he couldn’t see more than a few dozen feet in every direction – and on the other side of the canyon, another outcrop leading into a tunnel from which a red light illuminated a few dozen feet worth of cavernous rock. There was no sign of light from the planet’s surface above – nor would that have made sense if, as Anakin assumed, they were under the lake – but either way his doubts about the structural integrity of this complex multiplied tenfold.

Maul was standing right at the edge of the outcrop, and Anakin could see him making the judgement as to whether he could leap across the chasm. He couldn’t, of course, it had to be several hundred metres across.

“Maul, don’t even think it,” Anakin growled at him, still fighting for breath. Maul turned back with a derisive look.

“I told you, Skywalker, don’t try to give me orders,” he snarled. “I don’t take orders anymore – I’m _free_.”

And with that, and a three-step lead-up, he leapt off the edge of the outcrop.

High into the darkness he soared. The minimal light glinted off the metal of his legs, keeping him from becoming totally obscured by dark even when at his furthest point from the light. Moments later he cleared the chasm, and landed on the other side, on the opposite ledge.

He turned back, and Anakin knew he was smirking at him though he was too far away now for him to see. Then he ran into the tunnel and disappeared.

Anakin was left stunned.

_How the hell did he do that?!_

Even with advanced prosthetics, the jump was impossible – even with the Force it would have been highly unlikely, and Anakin could feel no sign of the Force even when he came as close as he could to the edge. Maybe with the cybernetic enhancement and the Force together it could be done, and it was true he’d seen Vader use the Force in areas he himself had been unable to, but to jump across a gap that enormous – well. It was madness.

_Should I try it?_ he wondered.

He took a closer look over the edge, but before he could make the inevitable choice for suicidal stupidity, something caught his attention that set his thoughts in a completely different direction.

A short way further down the sheer, rocky face of this black canyon, he could just make out a second, smaller outcrop – jutting out from a plain metal door. There was a square sign on the door and if he lay down on his stomach and extended his lightsaber as far as he could towards it, he could just make out what the door said:

**CONTROL ROOM**

*~*~*~*

Getting down the side of the cliff-face to the door was not as difficult as it at first appeared – there were enough footholds for him to make the descent and though he guessed it would be more difficult getting back up again, he had confidence.

As far as Maul went, he decided to forget about it for now. As long as he could free Obi-Wan and get back to him then they could figure out what they were going to do about Maul together.

Or, if Anakin was lucky, they would just decide to find Luke and leave this kriffing nightmare of a planet, Maul be damned.

But Obi-Wan would never decide that. Nor would he have been right to, with what Maul was. They were Jedi, and they needed to do the responsible thing, even if it was difficult in this place. That’s what Obi-Wan would decide, and Anakin would have to steel himself for it. Complaints would get him nowhere, and would have been shameful anyway – admitting that it was something Obi-Wan could do while he couldn’t.

Anything was possible, he told himself. He just had to pull himself together.

However much it… irked him, even before it happened. He had no right to feel that way anyway, when only a few hours ago he had thought Obi-Wan was dead.

… it still seemed so strange that…

_Never mind that now_ , he thought, as he found himself before the door. There was no grid shield generator on the front and the door opened easily.

Anakin walked into a small, rust-covered room with wall-to-wall terminals – mostly dead – and two decrepit metal folding chairs. Several equipment labels had been scratched out but there were three red indicator lights still working.

Two were on the main terminal, a panel of a half-dozen levers set to either on or off. The two working lights sat beside the only two levers whose labels were still legible:

DOOR RELEASE

CAGE

The ‘cage’ lever was pulled towards ‘ON’, while the door release was currently ‘OFF’. Anakin soon found when he tried to flip them the other way that they were stuck fast – even trying to use the wrench would have broken them before pulling them into the right place.

Seeing no immediate answer to that problem he turned his attention to the third indicator light – not a simple red bulb like the other two, but a number on the wall, flashing red. The number was displayed next to a label that said ‘MESSAGES’, and it seemed there were five of them.

Anakin’s eyes narrowed. There was a ‘Play’ button beneath the label, among other basic functions.

_All right,_ he thought with exasperation. _Let’s see what you’re going to throw at me this time._

He pushed. There was a faint static and then a voice – a woman’s, warbled and eerie.

_“The time is very nearly upon us. The time of awakening. What we bring forth into the universe will be much more than the strongest Sith ever known – she will be a GOD!_

_… and through her shall all our dreams be realised._

_My poor daughter called the Jedi to this place, in her agony, but this too can be used to our advantage. I have lured him into the labyrinth. If he strikes her down, she will become more powerful than he could possibly imagine. Everything is proceeding according to plan – and soon the whole galaxy will know her glory!_

_Do not allow your hatred for the Jedi to stop us now, Zeall – not when we are so close! Very soon you will be able to rain destruction upon their heads through her, but the crucial moment is yet to arrive!_

_The death of that one knight at her hands will be the last piece we need to achieve our goals – I have foreseen it! All will bow before the will of their new gods!_

_I will come to you when the moment is right. Through the Force, our bonds are broken. Our faith shall set us free.”_

The woman trailed off, cackling, and the message ended.

_Phanti,_ thought Anakin. _That had to be her._

The second message started before Anakin could analyse further. This time it was a man’s voice, warm but exhausted.

_“This is a message to any Jedi who finds their way down here in the event that I do not return.”_

There was a long, tired sigh.

_“The situation here is far more serious and complicated than I could have ever imagined. I…_

_I don’t have the time to go into detail, unfortunately. What Darth Phanti and Darth Zeall – whose identity, I’m afraid to say, is exactly what we feared it was – what they were trying to achieve here is madness beyond what even I thought capable of the Sith. Creating a ‘god’, and a ‘god’ that would enact their will upon the people of the galaxy – what hubris, to think the creature they envision would ever listen to_ them!

_… though at this point, I have to admit it might be possible. But for now Phanti is dead, killed by the daughter she had condemned to endless suffering – to save my life… and the life of the child. That child…_

_It tears at me, to think of the implications. The poor girl joined the Force to give her daughter the chance to live. I watched her burned body vanish into nothingness before my eyes, leaving only the putrid bandages, and in my arms – this infant._

And Anakin heard it: a soft, newborn’s mewl in the background.

_“And yet, if what Phanti and Zeall hoped to achieve really is still possible, I can’t... as a Jedi, I can’t deny that the kindest thing to do might be to put my hands around this child’s throat and…”_

Anakin held his breath.

_“… no. Damned though I may be, though we all may be, I can’t do it._

_I can’t tell them the truth. Better to say that her mother was forced by a Sith acolyte in some ritual – that her conception was otherwise natural. To suggest that she might actually be…_

_No, I couldn’t do that to her. The Force will be her guide. Will set her path._

_Not this nightmare.”_

The speaker took another slow, deep breath.

_“If you’re listening to this…_

_May the Force be with you.”_

The message ended there, as Anakin’s thoughts raced.

_The knight did escape with the girl._

This had to be ‘the knight’, though he’d given no name – the person Maul, the tapes from the lab and Obi-Wan’s ghost story had all been referring to. And the child…

Anakin couldn’t – wouldn’t think further on her now. He let the next message begin.

_“So… that was the Jedi fool’s plan.”_

This voice was a man’s again, but older-sounding; sneering. Yet his accent was closer to the knight’s than to Phanti’s.

_“I’ve seen the surveillance tapes and it confirms his words – our ‘holy mother’ is dead along with Phanti, and the Jedi has taken her child. By now he’ll have crossed the lake to the Fortress in hopes of stealing from our hyperfuel store._

_So be it – I at least know now it can be done._

_I shall have to try and retrieve the child before this intruder manages to leave the planet. She may not be the weapon we hoped for, but there is a strong chance she will nonetheless prove useful to our cause._

_For what use would the Jedi have for her? No more than another body in their futile parade of fodder to throw against the cannons of galactic degeneracy, in their effort to protect the degenerate. Here, I would raise her into a true warrior – a force for justice in the universe until the god we seek can bring universal justice. Having wasted so many years among the self-righteous Jedi and found nothing but petty vanity among the Sith, I am uniquely positioned to understand that much.”_

So Zeall – for this, Anakin surmised, was Zeall speaking – had once been a Jedi. Like Dooku.

Like Vader, if Luke’s ‘Ben’ was to be believed.

_“However, it seems this knight is more skilled than we initially presumed. Should I fall in the attempt, my daughter, I trust that you will continue our cause in my place – and perhaps finally understand the righteousness of it, and forget your childish aversion to suffering, and your ridiculous attachments._

_I am your father and your Master, girl, and you will obey me in this.”_

Zeall’s message ended there, with Anakin hoping he’d promptly died at the hands of the Jedi knight, though the host from the gameshow had implied his end had come from Oloré.

And indeed, in the fourth message…

_“Caden…”_

It was a woman’s voice, younger than Phanti had sounded; sad, anxious, but at the same time…

_“I thought of what you told me when I listened to these old messages. How my father, or that Jedi, could have seen what I saw on the same recordings and thought our sister_ died _… the old body she shed was gone but was it not as clear to you as it was to me that she had been reborn in the same instant?! A new life… I have seen the girl they propose to be her ‘daughter’ – but they are too alike in looks not to be the same person!_

_I_ know _my sister lives still, in another form.”_

… passionate.

“ _Caden, the Jedi who sought to destroy us is dead – no thanks to you I cut him down to fill her heart with hatred. Phanti has been avenged and soon the girl will find her way here, to the planet where she was born and reborn. I have ignited her passion to right these wrongs and it will lead her to the source of her true power! The power to change things in the galaxy for good!_

_Don’t you see?! Through her power the evils of the Jedi and the Sith will be brought to ruin, and all suffering in the universe will end! It will not be the hell my father envisioned, the endless torment of the unbelievers and revelry of the faithful but a true paradise – for_ every _sentient being!_

_If this eternal bliss demands my death at her hands, then I shall welcome it with open arms! Let her strike me down and come into her own. Let her become the god of this remade galaxy. I don’t understand why you would try to stop this!_

_Caden, brother – with the stakes as high as they are my path is clear to me. You may sit on the sidelines if it is your wish, but I warn you: do not stand in my way. I will not allow the entire galaxy to suffer for my attachment to you._

_…_

_…_

_… I only wish that you could see the truth I see.”_

So, then.

Anakin saw now what Caden had meant in his last note earlier, when he suggested Oloré had been driven mad. This voice had to be that of Oloré, after all.

But if her ‘sister’, the daughter of Phanti, had been subjected to some kind of horrific experiment in the hope that she would birth a Dark Side-powered ‘god’ – or so Anakin had inferred – then he supposed it made some sense that Oloré had lost the plot somewhere along the way.

The last message began thereafter. Expecting to hear from Caden now, Anakin was surprised when the voice that began speaking was that of a teenage girl – Ahsoka’s age, or thereabout.

_“… to believe this equipment still works after all these years. Ugh, so grimy.”_

Further to Anakin’s surprise, another voice answered her in the background; older, male and sounding a little out of place.

_“I thought you Jedi were supposed to be tougher than all that?”_

_“Yeah, well we’re supposed to not give in to revenge either, but here I am.”_

_“You’re still planning on killing her? That’s what she wants, you know – you heard it on the tape. And your Master wouldn’t want you to throw your life away, right?”_

_“…”_

There was a frustrated sigh. The girl spoke at length:

_“I don’t have all the answers, Detective. I just – kriff, I think I hit the ‘record’ button by accident. Is there anything – “_

_“Karabast – the ceiling!”_

The last message ended there. Anakin frowned, and looked up.

A hideous visage stared back at him with wide, pale blue eyes.

Startled, he backed up a step from the face on the ceiling. It was a mural, a painting of a middle-aged woman who closely resembled ‘The Mother’ on the token he’d found in Q3 B2; sharp features, hair up in a tight knot and decked out in black, Sith robes with a ragged green trim – her hands poised as if to throw Force lightning at him, her mouth grinning.

A caption beside her read:

**DARTH PHANTI**

… but Anakin wouldn’t have needed it to know that was the case.

The light from his flashlight threw conspicuous shadows across the mural, shadows whose origin drew his eye: it was her left arm. The right was painted on like the rest of her, but the left was three-dimensional, coming out of the ceiling towards him. He couldn’t tell how lifelike it was because apart from one finger – the index finger – it was gloved, yet he had been in this town long enough now for his brain to draw the instant line from her hand to that of the corpse in Lab 2, whose withered limb had been sticking out of the frozen chamber. The ring he had in his pocket had also been pulled from an index finger.

And what was it the copper band had had inscribed on it?

‘ _let me in_ ’?

Anakin found the ring among his many keys and pulled one of the folding chairs beneath the arm on the ceiling so he could stand on it and reach the hand. He half expected it to reach out and grab him when he pushed the ring onto the digit.

It didn’t, but that finger did curl in towards the palm, slightly.

A loud click came from the control panel. Wasting no more time, Anakin jumped onto the floor and flipped the Cage and Door Release levers to the opposite positions without further difficulty.

“Okay,” he breathed out. “Now, please actually be there when I get back, Master.”

But as he turned to leave, he glanced at the Messages panel on the wall one last time and considered for a moment.

_It wouldn’t take long_ , he thought. _System seems simple enough, and if Luke finds his way here…_

Anakin pressed a button on the panel with a universal ‘record’ symbol, and a green indicator light came on.

“Hey, Luke, if you get this – or if anyone else does – I found Maul. I couldn’t get much out of him and I don’t like the implications of what I did get, but he’s still alive for now – for whatever that’s worth.”

He took a deep breath.

“The good news is I also found Obi-Wan. Alive. I know it sounds crazy, but I swear – it was him. I don’t know why Vader brought him here, but for now I’m just going to count my blessings and try and get the hell out. Hopefully we can meet up at my transport later.

If this isn’t Luke listening to this… then I don’t even know where to start. The Sith presence in this town is like nothing I’ve ever encountered – the Master goes by ‘Darth Vader’ and he’s a whackjob cyborg in a life-support suit, but he’s insanely strong. Not much of a talker, so I don’t know what he’s planning, but it can’t be good.

Anyway, whoever gets this – good luck. May the Force be with you.

Unless you’re a Sith, in which case, fuck you.”

He hit the record button again and the indicator light went out – the number next to ‘MESSAGES’ changing to ‘6’. It wasn’t exactly a profound exhortation on his part, but at least he could say he’d left something for someone who might have shared this same misfortune.

Rubbing his tired eyes, he set off for the way he’d come, preparing for the climb back up to the higher ledge. But as he crossed the threshold onto the outcrop in the gigantic black chasm he turned toward the rockface and happened to glimpse inside the Control Room before the door shut behind him.

The number on the wall next to ‘MESSAGES’ said ‘7’.

_No it didn’t_ , he told himself a moment later. _You’re imagining things. It said ‘6’._

(But it hadn’t).

*~*~*~*

The path back to Obi-Wan was made significantly slower by the fact that skinless dogs started attacking him once he’d gotten back into the tunnel network. Anakin turned his flashlight off and proceeded purely by the light of the red saber, but it turned out the monsters were only fooled into thinking he was Vader with the addition of the respirator, and turning off the light just made them slightly less co-ordinated.

However, having a working lightsaber on his side made getting through these things a lot simpler than it would have been before.

_Hopefully Luke is okay too,_ he thought, moments after severing a skinless head from a maimed body.

He made his way back to the nexus point in the cavern, and hesitated – casting his eyes down each of the three paths on the other side of the energy bars in case by some miracle he could see the kid coming from one of those directions. No such luck.

_There had to have been another way out on his end,_ he thought. _He’ll be fine, and Obi-Wan and I will meet him back on the surface._

_If we don’t, I’ll just get Obi-Wan to the transport and come back for Luke._

With that decided, he broke into a run back down the first path.

_Just a little longer, Master. I’m almost back. Just wait for me a little longer._

He didn’t know if he was going to be able to keep from throwing himself onto the other man when he got there, after all that time thinking he was dead. Obi-Wan would harrumph about it of course, but he’d be pleased too – Anakin hoped – that they were both still alive. Anakin would do as many boring hours of meditation on his emotions as he wanted, once they were safe.

The ladder was soon in front of him. He climbed back up into the stone corridor, picking up his pace.

_It’s going to be all right._

Another dog was dispatched in a single blow by the red saber – the blade scorching the wall with Anakin’s wild swing.

_We’re going to get out of this together, Master and Padawan._

Another turn, and he could see the corridor that branched off back to where he’d first jumped down onto this level, and that stupid ‘THIS WAY’ sign.

_The Team, just like the stupid holo-reels call us._

He ran back down the hallway that turned right, closer and closer to the room Obi-Wan had been in.

_We’re going to be all right._

The door was at the end of the next turn.

_Everything’s going to be all right._

“Master!” Anakin called, slowing down just enough that he wouldn’t crash into the wall. “Master, I found the Control Room – are you okay!?”

He opened the door.

“Obi-Wan, are you – “

…

…

…

…

…

…

Anakin stopped and stood still, blinking under a low light. The red cage was gone and the door on the opposite side of the room was open.

Obi-Wan was lying on the floor in cream-coloured robes burned black at the edges, his top half several feet removed from his bottom half, his eyes half open and blank.

For a long time, or maybe for only a moment, Anakin stood at the entrance, completely still.

He couldn’t really _process_ it… but it looked like Obi-Wan had been completely cut in half by a lightsaber, the pieces left behind in this room like trash.

It was the same wound Vader had given him back at the Med Centre. And Anakin might have accepted that as an explanation for what he was seeing – and still seeing, no matter how many seconds passed or how many blows his heart rained on the inside of his chest – but he’d seen and spoken with Obi-Wan what – an hour ago?

That hadn’t been an illusion, or a hallucination. Anakin had seen both before, and this wasn’t like that. Was it?

Was it all just a dream?

Or was this the bad dream now?

No matter how long he stood there, doing nothing, nothing changed. Obi-Wan was still there, on the floor, in pieces.

Maybe…

Maybe he was standing too far away. The light stung more and more against his eyes, and he’d only seen Vader kill Obi-Wan through the gap in a closing door and from a distance. Maybe if he got a bit closer, he’d…

One step forward and his knee gave out, bringing the ground flying up towards him. He crawled forward, left arm shaking and barely able to hold the weight he put on it, not really wanting to get any closer but steadily, slowly, getting closer. Then he was kneeling next to Obi-Wan’s head, hand reaching out of its own accord.

“Master?”

He wasn’t sure why he said that, to a corpse. It didn’t make sense.

The tips of his fingers brushed against Obi-Wan’s forehead. He was solid, and lukewarm. The face was definitely Obi-Wan’s. Anakin ran his hand through the copper hair, smoothing it down.

“Obi-Wan?”

No answer. Why would there be? – it would have been impossible. He was obviously…

It didn’t make sense, though. He could feel the darkness inside him rising, boiling, ready to spill in anticipation of Anakin having to accept – over and over and over – that his master was dead, and they weren’t going to leave this place together.

Up, up and up his throat it went until he couldn’t hold the feeling in, and he had to let it out in a nervous, desperate peal of high-pitched laughter. The only answer was the echo of the laugh on the walls, then silence.

_What… did I just laugh?_

_Damn._

_I can’t be doing things like that, I’ll sound crazy._

At this point it might have been nice to think he was, but if craziness was anything like slaughtering an entire tribe in revenge for his mother’s death, then this wasn’t like that. He was not overpowered by the feeling. He kept waiting to be, but in vain.

His mind was still right there, in the room with his master’s dead body.

_Why? Why is it you who’s being killed and not me, Master?_

_Obi-Wan?_

There was no answer.

Then Anakin’s hand came down to rest on Obi-Wan’s shoulder, inadvertently moving his arm. His wrist turned, and something rolled out of his hand with a soft tap of toughened glass on metal floor. A small bottle with a wooden stopper, filled with white powder.

_What… ?_

Anakin picked up the bottle and turned it so he could look at a scrap of adhesive paper stuck at the top, labelling the substance in black ink:

**ZrO 2**

Zirconia.

The zirconia they needed to fix the transport’s life support system – he could easily synthesise a strip from this with the transport’s equipment. Anakin had forgotten all about it, given it up in the belief that getting the other parts would be impossible and they should just focus on getting out of the town.

But now this bottle was saying – _no, no – it_ is _possible._

And Anakin…

Anakin didn’t understand.

If Obi-Wan had had this on him before, why hadn’t he said anything?

It must have been planted. But by who? Someone in Silent Hill knew he needed it – they’d shown him that all the way back in Q3 B2. Probably they’d been able to listen in on his communications with Jesse. Was it Vader? He seemed the obvious choice, but Anakin didn’t understand why he’d leave the zirconia. _He_ wasn’t the one who liked playing these mind games – of that Anakin was somehow sure.

No, he had a very singular purpose. But then who was it? Who had killed those bodies at the auto shop and at the apartments? It couldn’t have been Phanti; she’d died a thousand years ago at the hands of her daughter and the nameless knight.

The only other person in town who’d known they needed a zirconia strip… was Luke.

It couldn’t have been Luke either, though.

_But Obi-Wan distrusted him from the beginning. And what do you_ really _know about him anyway?_

A fair question, and yet he couldn’t really entertain it, for the same reason he doubted Vader would leave him this bottle. It didn’t _feel_ right.

Nothing did.

He just kept sitting there.

“Come on, Anakin,” Obi-Wan would have said. “You have vital information to bring to the Senate. Off you go, now.”

Somehow, Anakin managed to lift his heavy head towards the open door, glancing over Obi-Wan’s legs and the cross-section of him he could see within the robes. The flesh was burning – he could smell it. He couldn’t see anything beyond the threshold of the door though: a scrap of corridor trailing off into pitch black that the light coming from this room allowed him to see.

As for what he could hear…

_Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap… tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap_

That was…

It was footsteps. Metal on metal. Like someone with metal shoes or legs –

Maul.

Anakin looked down at Obi-Wan’s body again. This was the exact same injury that… and if Maul had been able to find a way around, maybe – come in once Anakin had opened the door and taken away the cage and found Obi-Wan without a weapon…

Well, it made some sense, didn’t it?

Anakin staggered to his feet and then stumbled weakly out the door, toward the sound of the metal footsteps.

_Maul_ , he thought. _It was Maul then._

He extended the blade of the red lightsaber.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sigh. Looks like Obi-Wan's dead again...
> 
> But hey, at least Anakin finally got that zirconia! Two down, one to go - see you all next week!


	18. Nowhere

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again, friends - it's time for your weekly dose of horrible things!
> 
> In this chapter, Anakin fights Maul, falls into another hole, finds a secret tunnel and ends up somewhere unexpected. Enjoy!
> 
> Thank you all for sticking with this story, and especially for your comments - they are the backbone of this fic!

Anakin followed the sound as it waxed and waned, through a twisting mess of tunnels to a second vast canyon, much like the one Maul had somehow leapt across. But there were some key differences with this one.

Firstly, it was much hotter here, and for obvious reasons – while the previous canyon had been almost pitch-black, this space was relatively well-lit, by the huge and swiftly rushing river of lava flowing at the bottom of the cliff-faces.

Anakin could still see only darkness when he looked up, though.

Secondly, the fact the cliffs were well-lit showed that there was far more than one door embedded in their walls. In a glance Anakin could see hundreds, all no doubt leading to a new stretch of nightmare if there were any of them that even opened at all.

Finding that out wouldn’t have been as difficult as free-climbing the cliffs or leaping over the lava river to the other side, however, because thirdly there was a gigantic walkway structure built between the two cliff-faces – a tangled maze of rickety-looking metal stairs and bridges that led from various doors on one side of the chasm to the other.

Maul was spotted easily – the only moving object on the walkways – with his footsteps clanging even over the sound of the lava. Anakin honed in on him with narrowed eyes, watching him approach a door. A grid shield materialised over the door as soon as he was within reach, and he banged his fist on the metal railing before turning around.

His eyes, two pinpricks of gold at this distance, seemed to find Anakin immediately, and for a moment he was still. Then he ran.

_He did it,_ thought Anakin. _Why would he run now if he hadn’t? I saved him and he killed Obi-Wan, just like he killed Qui-Gon._

_This time I have to get rid of him for good._

There was no path onto the walkways from the outcrop Anakin had run out onto, but there was one coming off a door below and slightly to the side of him. Ignoring the risk of falling into the lava, Anakin slid down the cliff-face and landed on it with a thump. The metal felt thin and insubstantial beneath his feet, but Maul seemed to be having no trouble moving along these bridges, so Anakin wasn’t going to worry about that now.

He ran. The heat was oppressive – suffocating, intense to the point of being painful on his skin. Maul was higher up and taking the first flight of stairs towards him made the heat ease off slightly, but Anakin soon found that the route he’d taken didn’t actually seem to lead directly to the part of the network Maul was on, and he had to go back down a different flight in order to run for another bridge.

And Maul faced the same problem. Anakin saw him make it to three more doors as he tried to navigate the pathways, but all except one threw up a grid shield the moment he got near – and the one he was able to open… well. He took one look at whatever was on the other side and decided to try his luck elsewhere.

This meant he had to take a complicated route just to get out of that part of the network and closer to the centre, putting him in range of Anakin’s blaster.

But Anakin didn’t want to get him with a blaster. Obi-Wan would have thought that uncivilised.

No, Anakin was going to do his best to find out if Maul could survive without any upper body as well as he could without the lower.

_See if he can crawl away as nothing but a severed_ head.

He realised though, that while it looked like they were getting closer, in terms of being able to reach him via the maze of bridges they were actually quite far apart. Anakin had to turn and take a route that looked more promising.

A few flights of stairs and he could actually see the way to get to Maul – who had made it back to another part of the cliff and was trying to get through another door that threw up a shield as soon as he approached. Maul howled like an animal in frustration before turning back, but he realised quickly enough that ‘back’ was going to bring him to Anakin before he’d be able to get to a turning point.

However, Maul was capable of calculated risks as well. He glanced over the side, looked back at Anakin, and in the next moment vaulted over the railing and onto one of the lower walkways. Anakin rushed to the same spot to follow but then paused at the sound of groaning, breaking metal.

One of the supports on the bridge Maul had jumped onto had collapsed, sending the walkway lurching to the side, and Maul grabbed the railing on the other side with a cry of pain that told Anakin the metal was hot enough to burn that far down. He waited to see if the walkway would collapse entirely, and send Maul tumbling into the lava.

It collapsed, but Maul had scrambled onto a stairway and steadier ground before the bridge slipped into the river – leaving Anakin unable to use that same shortcut to follow him.

Anakin growled and ran back to find another way, keeping an eye on Maul every other moment as he climbed. This worked against him – unable to focus on the absurd layout of this collection of bridges he wasn’t planning his path out in a way that might have led him to Maul sooner in the long run.

But Anakin couldn’t focus on anything except cutting Maul into pieces right now.

So the chase continued for what could have been less than a minute or over an hour, as Maul tried more doors in vain and Anakin followed random staircases in an effort to get close to him, feeling dizzier and dizzier in the heat as more time passed.

Finally, an opportunity presented itself. Maul was on the bottom level, cringing against the heat and so close to the lava its light made him look like he was glowing. Anakin was two flights above him, and slightly to the side – so, within jumping distance. Probably.

_I can make it. If he can leap around the way he’s been doing, I can at least make that jump. For Obi-Wan._

It didn’t seem too far, honestly. He’d have been able to make the jump without a problem if he’d had the Force. Maybe he’d get a glimpse of it as he jumped the way he’d done at other times – either way, he was going to do it.

Anakin climbed up onto the rail and at the same moment Maul turned around to look for him. Judging by the surprised reaction he must have been closer than Maul had thought, and in that instant he knew he had to make the jump then and there before Maul reacted and got too far ahead of him.

Then, Anakin jumped.

The Force did not, in fact, come to him at the last moment to assist the movement – he was left completely on his own scant metres away from burning alive as he fell towards that walkway. At the last second he could tell he wasn’t going to clear the rail, but it didn’t matter. His boots hit the very edge of the metal with a clang and his weight plunged forward, but his body hit the rail and bounced back.

Anakin reached out to grab the rail before he could fall into the lava, without thinking. It was an incredible shock when his left hand closed on the metal. The heat pressed into the skin of his palm like a million tiny creatures had bitten a part of his hand away all at once, and he let go instinctively. His right hand held on, and when his foot slipped he managed to throw his weight forward enough to wrap his whole arm around the rail.

_And after seeing Maul give himself the exact same injury. I’d almost forgotten what an idiot I was._

His clothing gave the upper, inside of that arm where there was still skin to feel some protection, along with his ribs where the rail was clutched between them, but it was still painful, and he was quick to hurl himself up and over the rail as soon as possible. There was an uncomfortable screeching sound from the structure, but Anakin was much lighter than Maul was with his heavy prosthetics, and the bridge held up. His left palm burned, increasing his dizziness.

Seeing Maul before him helped him focus. He had stopped and turned back, no doubt deciding whether or not to take advantage of Anakin’s slip-up by increasing his lead or by going back and kicking him into the river, but Anakin recovered too quickly for him to do either. Instead, he decided to open his mouth for some reason.

“Is it really that important to you to take me down now, Skywalker!?” he yelled. “Here, after everything that’s happened?”

With a bark of laughter, Anakin called back hoarsely, “I don’t know, Maul – seen Obi-Wan around lately!?”

Maul chuckled weakly and replied, with abject misery –

“Everywhere.”

That was good enough for Anakin, who extended the blade of the red saber and brought it up to a guard. Maul did likewise with his own lightsaber – the blade holding its form – as he looked back quickly to the door he had been headed to, judging whether or not it was worth trying to get to it and cutting himself off from any other way of escape.

Giving him no more time to think, Anakin rushed at the other man, raining down a series of powerful blows with all the energy he could muster. Maul was fast, and able to block every attack, but despite the fact that sans Force the disparity should have been in his favour, with his stronger legs and baseline upper body-strength, Anakin seemed to be more powerful – and was pushing him back exactly in the direction he wanted to.

Maul was afraid – he could see it in his eyes – and in a split-second he used his advantage in speed to race to the other end of the walkway, and Maul must have had some kind of Dark-side god looking out for him, because this was the one door that actually opened, automatically, as soon as Maul approached. He legged it into the dark tunnel beyond without a second thought, and with an angry roar Anakin raced after him.

The next stretch of their fight was a blur. Anakin took barely any notice of the make-up of this tunnel, allowing instinct to guide him as he struck blow after blow, driving Maul continually further down the path.

_He killed Obi-Wan. He killed Obi-Wan. He killed Obi-Wan._

They were both hindered by exhaustion; Maul wild with fear and Anakin with rage – which left their fight an uncoordinated mess, neither participant able to think tactically as they were usually both so capable of. Anakin struck out, rapid blow after blow, and Maul blocked or dodged as best as he could, parrying a few strikes here and there in a clumsy, ineffectual fashion. It was the kind of fighting that would have had the Jedi Council revoke Anakin’s lightsaber – perhaps permanently – had they been there to see it. One was not meant to be so reckless with one’s _life_.

But Anakin was only thinking about one member of that Council now.

This lasted until they came to the end of this stretch of tunnel, and another door – a dead end in all likelihood unless Maul was carrying a key. And in a certain sense they were each of them carrying the ultimate key, as Maul put in a burst of speed to get ahead of Anakin and slashed his lightsaber up the hinge side of the steel door then backed into it with enough force to push it open, stumbling through into a dark room on the other side.

There, Maul was very quickly brought to a disadvantage. He hadn’t expected there might be new terrain and he lost his balance on it, then failed to get enough of a grip to right himself. It was only because this new interior was enough to give Anakin pause that he was granted a reprieve.

The room they’d come into was fairly large, the walls plain and not immediately distinguishable in terms of material while lit only by the two lightsabers. The floor was covered in fine, pale sand – dry and horrible for combat, and the sand was dotted with a few dozen markers, about three foot high each, dark and heavy.

Gravestones – in the Tatooine style. Anakin spared a glance at the nearest, but the name on it was illegible.

There was no other door in the room and with Anakin blocking the only exit Maul decided to try his luck with opening a dialogue again.

“Is this…” he choked out, staggering to his feet, “a Jedi technique I’m not familiar with? Waving a lightsaber around in a mindless rage to slaughter your opponent without mercy?”

Anakin was only more angered, but pausing had made him aware of how much his throat was crying out for water he didn’t have, and he allowed himself the opportunity to regain his breath. Maul continued.

“Don’t get me wrong, Skywalker. I have no quarrel on that account. What does killing a person matter anyway?”

“Of course you’d say that,” snarled Anakin. “You’re nothing but a mad dog.”

“Yes, yes,” said Maul, bringing his lightsaber up to guard position again. “I’m sure you have a lot of room to criticise. Don’t forget – you were called here too. You and I are far more the same than – “

“Shut up!” Anakin roared, and charged at him.

Their fight resumed, even more ungainly than before on the sandy terrain with the markers in the way. Maul was facing the door most of the time, and Anakin could see him trying to figure out how to get behind him so he could escape back through the tunnels and onto the walkways, but he had no intention of letting that happen.

By contrast, Anakin had the rest of the room in his sights, and enough light to just make out that there were a few open graves at the back. He decided to try and press Maul towards them, hoping to trip him into one so he could catch him off guard and finally end him.

Maul seemed to have gained a second wind though, and crowding him was more difficult now.

The battle raged on. Both were slower than they had been in order to avoid the markers, which Anakin caught glimpses of every now and then as he fought. Not all the names upon them were obscured – he saw one which said plainly,

HEGO DAMASK

… and another whose epitaph, ‘TRAITOR’ was clearly visible, though all he could see of their name was that it had begun with an ‘R’ character.

Many of these markers were sliced through during the fight. Several times the blades of his or Maul’s lightsaber dragged through the sand, and left behind a trail of molten glass that cooled off into little ramp shapes, edged with icicle-like drips – and if a piece of stone marker was cut so that it fell and smashed these structures, then that area of their arena was covered in broken glass.

At length Maul made a critical error. Teeth bared at Anakin with frustration he dropped his guard to lure him in, and Anakin was lured, but then Maul brought his leg swinging up with a flick, not to kick Anakin but to kick sand up into his eyes. However, this was the oldest trick in the book on Tatooine, and Anakin recognised the signs.

He dropped behind a marker and then swept his blade out under it as Maul tried to barrel through the sand to knock him down. The tip of the blade sliced the edge of his ‘ankle’, sending him crashing into another marker with a pained grunt.

Maul kicked Anakin with his damaged leg when he tried to press the advantage, sending a blast of pain through his abdomen, but the leg was still damaged, and when Maul tried to spring back up it buckled on him, and he reeled back.

One of the disadvantages of prosthetics was that you couldn’t always necessarily ‘tell’ how damaged one was the way you could with organic limbs. Maul was trying to put weight on the ankle instinctively, without the answer of ‘pain’ to let him know the leg couldn’t take the weight.

He was right on the edge of one of the open graves, and a careless wave of his arm for balance sent the top of another nearby marker falling to the sand. Unfortunately for Anakin’s plan, Maul turned back at the sound, saw that the marker was in front of one open grave, and looked the other way to see that he was right on the verge of stepping into another. All while Anakin was still reeling from his kick.

But then, instead of taking a step away from the edge, Maul froze.

“Wh-what?” he muttered.

In that moment Anakin felt something – a pull in the Force. He didn’t think, he just reacted, and pushed as hard as he could.

The jolt hit Maul in the centre of his back and he fell, screaming, into the open grave.

“No – NO!”

His low howl became suddenly distant, like he was travelling far away at great speed. Alarmed, Anakin deactivated the red lightsaber and limped forward to see how deep this grave had actually been.

The answer, it turned out, was ‘apparently bottomless’.

He’d pushed Maul into yet another black hole in the floor, in the shape of a grave.

_That’s messed up. That’s so messed up._

And there was more. A glance up at the marker before the grave had him do a double-take in realisation of what had distracted Maul so badly in the first place.

The name on the marker read:

**DARTH MAUL**

Anakin took a step back. His head turned, looking perhaps for an explanation as to why there was a gravestone for Maul in this room, in a sand pit miles underground, in front of an open grave that was a bottomless pit – and that he should _happen_ to fall in...

His eyes fell on the grave next to it, also open and also bottomless as far as he could see. Maul’s saber had sliced right through the last name on the monument, though Anakin could make out that the character it began with was an ‘S’, but the first name above it was clearly visible:

**LUKE  
S**

_No,_ he thought, taking another unconscious step back. _No, it can’t be…_

He took another step back.

The ground slipped away from beneath his foot and he fell with his heart leaping into his throat – grabbing desperately for some sort of purchase on the insubstantial edge of yet another open grave, and finding nothing but soft, useless sand. As he clawed at the side with his metal arm he looked around wildly for something to hold onto, only to see the name on the marker for this grave clearly visible as well:

**ANAKIN  
SKYWALKER**

Then, Anakin fell – screaming.

*~*~*~*

Silence.

Once the breath in Anakin’s lungs had all been spent on that one scream, the fall continued into the dark. Anakin reached out for the Force and it seemed not far off, but in that ‘broken transmission’ sense, here and gone and here and gone again, so that he could never get enough of a hold of it to truly feel like he was slowing his descent.

That was what he was trying to do. But all he knew was that he was falling. After all these dark holes he’d gone into yet he was falling still.

Down.

Down.

Down.

He’d lost track of how many of these pits he’d come down through. Just how far down he must actually have been.

Was it even possible to get back up at this point? What if this hole really was bottomless?

The next thing he became aware of was that he couldn’t breathe.

_I’m dying_ , he thought. _I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying –_

_… why won’t it stop?_

_I…_

…

He remembered this constricting presence, all around him, and a sudden fear of not knowing where he was or what had happened, what the last thing he remembered was and what was dream when he came to in his Master’s arms. It had been so cold where they weren’t touching, and so hot where they were.

“… and the mother goddess put a curse on this ‘nymph’ – a sort of nature spirit, if you will – that she would never again be able to speak anything but the last few words that had been spoken to her. Her name was… Anakin? Anakin, are you awake?”

Something had been wrong, he remembered now. The way the water had been burning its way into his inner core. Had he still been drowning?

“Anakin?”

He’d been trapped. That was what it had felt like then too. Trapped and dying, and trapped _in_ his dying. In the heat and in the cold.

“Shh. Anakin, calm yourself, you’re safe, you’re safe! Anakin, listen to the sound of my voice. Listen to what the Force tells you, you’re safe.”

He didn’t remember now the moment, when he realised he’d been sleeping nearly naked in Obi-Wan’s nearly naked embrace, not trapped or dying – only panicking, remembering what was through the ice but not how he’d been rescued.

Obi-Wan had saved him from drowning, then saved him from freezing, and he had woken up there in his arms, panicking like an animal.

Why couldn’t he have been more like a Jedi?

“Anakin? Anakin, are you all right?”

“… Master?”

“Oh, Anakin – thank goodness. Honestly, Padawan, you gave me quite the scare.”

The arms that were around his chest tightened a little, pulling him further back into a warm chest. Part of him wanted to soak up that warmth, but…

“Master… my clothes?”

“Drying still, I’m afraid. I decided to risk the fire. I’m sorry, Anakin, I know this state of affairs must be uncomfortable for you, but it was all I could do to stop you freezing.”

Anakin had fallen into ice-water, so that made sense. Why, then, had he felt like this was worth panicking over? Because he’d almost died?

But he was supposed to be a Jedi.

There’d been a twisting, gnawing feeling in him. A bundle of anxiety and foreboding that he couldn’t understand, expanding and contracting in his chest with each breath.

And he felt like that now, too.

_But it was all right then_ , he tried to tell himself. _You pushed through that stupid feeling you can do the same now._

_You have to._

_You’re the Chosen One._

_…_

_… that’s what Obi-Wan believed, anyway._

The silence swirled around like a storm inside his head. He remembered wishing later that he had taken what was probably the only opportunity he’d ever have to relax into Obi-Wan’s arms and let him tell stories of other planets and old poems even other Jedi only pretended to have read, at least until he was warm enough or his clothes had dried. He wished it now.

But he’d squirmed and panicked – not violently, but not able to calm himself down either – until Obi-Wan had felt compelled to put him to sleep again and he’d woken up still panicking until at last Obi-Wan had gotten through to him that they were safe and…

And that was then.

Obi-Wan was never going to come to his rescue again.

_Isn’t that what you had wanted, though?_

Or is it?

Anakin breathed out, and couldn’t feel a thing.

Only…

…

… somewhere in the back of his mind –

_“If you only knew the power of the Dark Side…”_

…

…

…

Something clinked onto the floor next to him. Like a falling cup, almost.

Anakin opened his eyes and breathed in again.

He had registered no impact of his body on the ground but the ground was pressing into his body now. Seeing nothing but darkness, he scrambled for the switch on his flashlight. His eyes strained to adjust to its harsh glow as he ran his hands over his body to check for injuries. The kick Maul had given his abdomen certainly registered, and the usual aches from a few rounds of impromptu shock therapy courtesy of the nonsensical ring of arms, but he didn’t think anything was broken.

“You should still put some of that bacta you’ve been hoarding on that bruise, sir,” he could imagine Rex saying.

He had to use at least some on his burned left hand. His adrenaline levels must have been normalising because it hurt like hell. The bacta soothed his palm, but he didn’t bother to use any on his abdomen – he didn’t think Maul had done any permanent damage. It was probably fine.

With that sorted he took a closer look at his surroundings. The floor was earthen, dusty but smooth enough to have been made by sentient hands – and that was about all he could say. Every direction he pointed his flashlight in showed only more floor, stretching away into blackness. No sign of a ceiling either. Whatever chamber he was in, it had to be massive.

“Maul?” he called, without thinking. The other man was probably not going to answer him, given where they’d just come from, but the holes they’d fallen into had only been a few feet apart – so they had to have come out in the same place, right?

He’d dropped the red saber on the way down and found it with his light a few metres away. The Force was being fickle again, but he got the feeling that if Maul had fallen into the same place – which he had to have done – he had either found some way out already or the fall had killed him: either way, he wasn’t here now.

_Something else fell though, didn’t it? You heard it drop._

Anakin peered more closely at the surrounding area, flinching when the light glared on a metal object on the floor. He approached, rubbing his eyes, and picked it up – another rectangular token, decorated with red lines this time. In the same red were the words:

**THE RABID  
DOG**

Peace-Bringer. Star Pilot. Rabid Dog. An eclectic collection.

Anakin took the other two out of his pocket and held them up against each other, but the lines didn’t match with this new piece in any of the combinations he tried. It could be that he had to find Luke and make a match with all six pieces, but in this case he doubted it.

His fists clenched, despite the pain of the burn. Back to playing stupid games with tokens – and why not? Now the person who had known him longer and better than anyone else in the universe was dead...

_“We are Jedi, Anakin.”_

Anakin sighed heavily.

Vader posed a threat to the entire Republic, and even if he couldn’t kill him here he was the only one who could get the information he’d gathered on him back to the Jedi Council and the Senate. Luke might be vital in that respect as well; Anakin hadn’t heard his whole story yet, and he couldn’t leave him trapped in this town with Vader anyway.

_But how was Obi-Wan even… it just doesn’t make any sense!_

‘Exactly’ Maul had told him. Leaving aside the whole clusterfuck with that lunatic for the moment, it wasn’t that Anakin had never considered the possibility that this was all somehow a giant illusion. He would have put that red saber up to his own chest and switched on the blade if he thought he could make that be the case, but the reality was that despite the suppression, he had felt the Force several times since he came here, and the Force didn’t lie.

Luke was real. Anakin had caught the briefest glimpse of Vader’s Force-presence too, and it proved to him that this was not an illusion. And as the oppressive weight of the darkness on all sides pressed down on him, smothering his earlier rage, he felt more than lucid enough to declare it was no dream either.

So he had to keep going.

It wasn’t like he wanted to die _here_ , of all places.

(In his daydreams, Obi-Wan held him as he died, having brought balance to the Force, and told him he had done a good job, and he was very proud of him.)

Now, where to turn to first in this black dungeon of nothing? It was difficult to figure out when the flashlight showed him only darkness in every direction, but after a few moments of quiet consideration there was a clue. A noise – too quiet for him to discern its nature – sounded somewhere to his right.

Anakin frowned and jogged in that direction, grateful beyond measure for even the smallest distraction from the headache that was trying to figure this place out. His side hurt with each step, and his left hand hurt non-stop, but still barely enough for him to take note of as he ran.

A minute or so of that and the decision paid off – there was an object other than himself in this space the light slowly drew in to focus as he ran.

It was large, the size of a small room in itself, and Anakin recognised it for what it was as soon as there was enough light to see the roughly circular platform, tall, tablet-like chambers and large central machinery all wrecked and rusted and dead. A carbonite freezing system. An ancient one – as far as the technology went – but still something new enough in itself to surprise him by its presence.

But then, there was nothing that said no one had been down here since Darth Oloré’s day.

A brief glitter of his light on a section of the main reactor’s casing had Anakin step onto the platform cautiously to investigate. On said casing was a series of scratch-marks, etching the words:

_he is darkness and I am but I am not  
him but he sees me wherever I  
go he is with me and he is me and  
the light shows him the darkness  
in me where the things I do are   
not me but him but he is me and  
what I am in the dark he  
disappears like I disappear  
am disappearing into the  
dark is me_

_he is my shadow_

“What do you think, Master?” Anakin muttered, to no one. “Not exactly Laureate material, huh?”

Well, for all Anakin knew, it was. He never understood how half the garbled verses Obi-Wan admired were considered ‘good’. He stood up again and began to move his flashlight over the rest of the machine.

Mostly it looked like an otherwise unremarkable piece of junk, but Anakin’s interest was soon piqued when he came around to the other side of the device and found three black, stone tablets – the same size and shape as the freezing chambers, but clearly there for some other purpose. There was a curious looking slot in the inward-facing side of each one, and on one face of each a bit of paper, stuck with adhesive strips.

These were not notes. They had no words written on them – but they were definitely clues.

Each one was a drawing, a drawing that looked like it had been made by a child. Anakin thought of the drawing in Caden’s first book for Oloré, but there was no way for him to tell if the same ‘artist’ was also behind these.

The first showed a monster; red, with two long horns, spikes down its back and tail, and a wide mouth filled with a zigzag of sharp teeth. It held a round-headed figure with crosses for eyes, and its own were shown with black holes – a pen dragged around and around in a circle on the paper. More red scribbles here and there were the only other things on the paper except for the poorly-coloured black background.

Also on a poorly-coloured black background, dotted with stars formed from an upright triangle over an upside-down triangle, was a simplistic representation of some kind of small fighter, blue, with a single pilot waving out from the cockpit – his hand bigger than his head. Perspective was not the artist’s strong suit, it had to be said; the fighter was drawn from a top-down view but the pilot was in profile, so it looked like he was lying sideways in the cockpit.

He was grinning, but his eyes were also opaque black whirls like the monster’s.

The third drawing was of a figure in a black robe holding some kind of ancient weapon with a curved blade – complete with red scribble. Its face was white, mostly round with a square bottom, and the same black-hole eyes as the other two. A skull, or at least a skull-mask. At their feet were a number of other figures the artist hadn’t coloured, all with crosses for eyes.

The background on the third drawing was red. Anakin found these clues easy enough to decipher.

The monster was ‘The Rabid Dog’, The figure in the fighter was ‘The Star Pilot’. And the one with all the dead bodies…

… ‘The Peace-Bringer’.

Because he brought death.

Right. _Of course._

A quick check of the slots on the edges of the tablets and Anakin confirmed they were the same size as the tokens he’d found. Without missing a beat, he inserted each of the rectangular strips into the slots on the tablet with the drawing that corresponded to their description.

They fit easily, and a series of clunking noises ensued from beneath the machine. Finally, one of the panels in the floor depressed and slid sideways, revealing yet another descent into more blackness.

Anakin shut his eyes and ran his hands through his hair with a growl. Of course.

There were rungs, but the space was tight enough to be the least inviting of all the black pits yet. Every time he thought he was as far down into the planet’s crust as he could possibly go, another level down into the darkness appeared.

But there was nothing else for it. Anakin went down.

*~*~*~*

Further and further into the hole, Anakin was trying not to think about anything, as if he could treat this descent like a meditation, almost.

He couldn’t, of course – Anakin struggled with meditation on the best of days: exhausted, dehydrated, bruised, battered and on the brink of more than one kind of collapse, his thoughts began to drift toward the long ladder from the labs down to where he’d first seen Luke, and how worried he’d been during that climb that he was going too far down. How much he wished he was that far up now.

Force, but he wanted to see the sky again.

_Come on. How long have you been down here? A day? Boo fucking hoo._

Jedi Knights were supposed to be able to handle stuff like this. Even that Padawan, from so long ago, had sounded like she was still pretty determined despite everything she had been through.

Her Master dead – murdered by the Sith to try and break her. Her own nature… questionable. Anakin didn’t want to think about that part now though, and if Vader was trying to break him then the last thing Anakin wanted to do was to give him what he wanted.

Much as he hoped Oloré had been put out of her misery as soon after the Padawan had recorded that message as possible, he hoped more that the Padawan hadn’t fallen into darkness in order to achieve that end. He wanted to believe she hadn’t.

Was it really possible though, for someone in that position to avoid it?

_Master…_ he thought.

_Did you really think_ I _could be the one to bring balance to the Force_?

Anakin kept going down.

And down.

And down.

Even with the bacta, the pain in his left hand was intense. At one point he even considered letting go of the rungs and falling to the bottom to save time and agony – it had worked to get him to the level above, after all. And yet, the ladder being here kind of implied that it was meant to be used.

_Still running around this maze, Chosen One. I’m sure Phanti and Zeall would be thrilled._

Well, Phanti and Zeall were dead, so fuck them both.

After an eternity of climbing, Anakin realised there were no more rungs for him to step down to. Only when he looked beneath him did he realise that this was because he had already reached the bottom of the ladder, and was standing in a small, cramped hole on a filthy dirt floor.

It was another stretch of this torturous slog over with, but considering everything, it didn’t feel like much of an achievement.

_Okay. Now what?_

The only thing in this hole, was another hole. This time it was at the bottom of the wall, and lateral; a pitch-black tunnel that might have been no more than a drain, and looked almost too tight for him to crawl through.

With nowhere else to go, he crouched down onto his knees and awkwardly manoeuvred himself into it like some kind of vermin finding a crack in a wall to slither into. Again the tunnel seemed to have just been dug into the earth, wet and dark. The air was closer than before. Anakin found himself thinking more than ever of the tonnes upon tonnes of rock and metal that must have been above him – how old this tunnel must have been, and how easily it might fall down upon him.

And it drew in further as he went. After a hundred metres or so he could no longer crawl on his knees and had to settle for pulling himself along with his arms, the top of his head brushing the dirt and his chest pressed into the ground so the flashlight was smothered on and off with every lurch forward.

He had to keep going forward though. It wasn’t like he could go back.

… though he couldn’t help but feel the tunnel was just going to keep getting smaller, until he was completely trapped.

_Breathe_ , he told himself. _Just breathe._

Doing so was getting more and more difficult, with the earth around him pressing in so close. Like it was too close even for his lungs to inflate properly.

_It’s not that bad. Just keep going. Phanti and Zeall had to have built this tunnel as an escape route, so it’s got to come out somewhere._

Another voice inside him asked _– oh, really? After a thousand years you don’t think it might have changed shape? Not even with, oh, I don’t know – a nearby volcanic eruption or something?_

_But what did you expect to find, at the bottom of your own grave?_

Anakin shook his head and tried to take in deeper breaths, metal fingers digging into the dirt as he moved forward another few inches.

_Don’t think like that. Vader put those gravestones there to fuck with you – you’re a kriffing Jedi, act like it!_

_There is no emotion._

“There is no emotion,” Anakin choked out. The sides of the tunnel had drawn in, and he couldn’t really extend his elbows out to crawl. “There is peace.”

He was pulling himself along by clawing at the narrow sides now. And yet, the Jedi Code, somehow, actually felt like a comfort for once.

Maybe because Obi-Wan would have been happy to hear him relying on it.

“There is no emotion.” He breathed in, and out. “There is peace.”

_Come on. You can do this._

“There is no emotion, there is peace.”

Despite all those years of Obi-Wan drilling it into his skull, it was actually difficult for him to remember what came next. But he told himself that if he remembered it, and said the whole thing, he’d reach the end of the tunnel that felt close enough around him to be some kind of horrible, suffocating suit, and he kept repeating the first line until he remembered the second.

“There is no emotion, there is peace. There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.”

Anakin didn’t have a clue what was going on, so that part was a lie. But he kept going.

“There is no emotion, there is peace. There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.”

He knew what came next.

“There is no passion, there is serenity.”

Though he didn’t feel he was experiencing either right now.

“There is no emotion, there is peace. There is no ignorance, there is knowledge. There is no passion, there is serenity. There is…”

He couldn’t breathe. The walls were holding him too tightly.

“There is…”

_“There is no chaos,”_ Obi-Wan had tried to teach him.

“There is no chaos, there is harmony. There is no emotion, there is peace.”

He couldn’t breathe. He was trapped. Everything hurt.

“There is no ignorance, there is knowledge. There is no passion, there is serenity. There is no chaos, there is harmony.”

But it almost felt like… this was something he should have been used to by now.

Well.

He remembered the last part easily enough.

“There is no death. There is the Force.”

His hand touched solid earth. He’d reached the end of the tunnel.

A dead end.

No.

No, no, _no, no, no!_

In a complete panic, without any peace, knowledge, serenity, harmony – and certainly without the Force – Anakin began scratching at the dirt at the end of the tunnel in a desperate attempt to keep going forward.

He couldn’t breathe.

He was being buried alive.

He was…

…

…

He was scratching at something much harder than earth. For a terrifying moment he thought he’d just hit a bed of harder rock, but the pressure on the nails of his right hand was telling – too hard for stone, it was definitely metal he was touching.

As he scraped away at it, whimpering pathetically, hyperventilating, he began to feel out something round – a metal ring – a handle. He pulled, and slowly and reluctantly the round handle turned, bit by agonising bit, groaning and screeching in a way that made his spine shake. Then, at last, the door behind the two inches or so of earth at the end of the tunnel swung out, allowing new air into Anakin’s lungs.

Light followed, too bright for Anakin’s tired eyes to contend with. He screwed them shut as he pushed the door open all the way.

Scrambling forward with every last ounce of strength he could muster, Anakin tumbled out onto the ground of a more open area, about a two foot drop below the hatch he’d crawled out of, and for a moment he lay there, gasping for breath. Above him, the hatch slammed shut again, and he could hear the wheel turn automatically.

He just kept breathing. In and out. In out. In out. Gasp after wretched gasp of cool…

… fresh…

_Wait, what?_

Anakin forced his eyes open, taking in the dark green blur than slowly coalesced into the grass that he was lying on. He looked up, but there wasn’t much to see but white in the thick fog that surrounded Silent Hill.

He rose quickly and looked back at the hatch, which was set into the ground of a grassy bank, coming out the back of the Silent Hill Research Station.

“No,” said Anakin, shaking his head.

He turned the other way, and there was the lake, and a small dock with a primitive boat waiting.

“No. No, this isn’t…”

He’d gone down two long, long elevator shafts. All those seemingly bottomless dark pits. Descended more ladders than he could remember off the top of his head. He’d been continually going down, and down, and down – into the very depths of the planet. Then through one, horizontal tunnel and…

And here he was, back on the surface again.

“That’s _impossible_ ,” he whispered.

A moment later, the static on his communicator started playing up.

“General? Gen… Skywalker, can you hear me, over?”

_Jesse?_

Anakin stared at the device, and then again at the open sky above him.

“General, are you reading, over? I just picked up your signal again are… there, over?”

Weakly, Anakin pushed a button on the communicator.

“… Jesse?”

“Ah – there you are. I was beginning to think you’d fallen down a hole somewhere, sir!”

Jesse chuckled, and Anakin breathed out. He couldn’t _think_ , in any meaningful sense of the term, but hearing the familiar voice went a long way to soothing the turmoil that was in his mind.

“Jesse… you’re all right, thank goodness.”

“I never said I was all right, sir.”

And just like that, the relief vanished. Anakin took a deep breath.

“Jesse, what’s wrong?” he asked, as calmly as he could.

“Well, honestly, sir? A lot. But let’s hear what you’ve been up to first, General – because it sounds like you’ve been through the wars.” He paused. “So to speak,” he added, and he laughed again.

“I…”

Anakin didn’t know where to start. He didn’t know if he should even try, or focus his efforts on getting Jesse to explain what was going on with him. The volcano might have been safe by now, and Anakin could have tried to get back up the mountain road to the transport, but…

… but there was also Luke to consider.

“I made it to the Research Station,” he said, trying to keep it professional. “Underground complex – the Sith Master, Maul and Luke were all there,” and Obi-Wan, but... “… I don’t know what happened to any of them. I don’t know how I got out.”

“Is there anything you do know, sir?” Jesse asked, mockingly – and that was so unlike him…

_He’s not well. Pull yourself together and be strong for the both of you. He’s your man, and your responsibility._

“I have the zirconia we need for the repairs. The hyperfuel…”

_“ – broke into our hyperfuel store in the fortress north of the lake – “_

“… the hyperfuel is supposed to be in a fortress north of the lake. I could head there next, but – “

“Seems like that would be the thing to do, doesn’t it?”

Jesse’s interruption sounded irritated, like he thought Anakin was an idiot for being uncertain about it but was trying not to let it show. He probably wanted this all over and done with and to be with his brothers again.

“… you’re right. I just… I’m kind of worried about you, Jesse,” he admitted softly. “Maul put you through the ringer, and I don’t want to risk losing you.”

“Losing me? But sir, I’m safe as houses up here, don’t you think? What’s there to be worried about?”

Anakin’s pulse began to thump harder.

“You just… don’t sound like yourself,” he said

“Oh, I don’t, do I? Don’t sound like good old CT-5597 Jesse?” He put an emphatic drawl on each digit in the number as he fired them off. “Not that you’d notice the difference if I wasn’t from my voice alone – I expect all us clones sound the same to most people, sir.”

… what?

But… but his men knew he didn’t think of them like that, didn’t they? Especially those that had fought beside him for so long – he wouldn’t really think that of him, right?

Almost a plea, he whispered back, “Jesse?”

“ – So there’s not much to worry about if they have to plonk another shiny into my place, is there? Sir, if you think there’s something wrong with me you are more than within your rights to put a blaster bolt through my head and requisition a replacement. You can even give him the same tats if it makes the transition easier.”

He laughed. White noise began to gather in Anakin’s head again. He stuttered –

“That’s not… that’s not within my rights. Jesse, I know you’re not well now, but I promise you I’m going to come back and get us out of here, okay? Please believe me.”

“I did, once,” said Jesse.

A long silence passed.

“… suppose I’ll have to again, won’t I? Good soldiers follow orders, after all. I’ll check in with you later, sir.”

“Jess – “

“Over and out.”

The call ended. Suddenly dizzy, Anakin sat down on the grass, collecting himself.

_There is no emotion_.

He leant back against the bank and the fog drifted slowly above his head.

Maybe Jesse wasn’t suffering from the after-effects of Maul’s influence. Maybe he was just sick of Anakin’s shit, and in these conditions even the loyalty of a clone had been pushed too far. Anakin had left him alone in this place with only droids and corpses for company.

_There is no death._

… maybe Jesse blamed him for that.

Before he could think of a reason why he shouldn’t, there was suddenly more static coming from his communicator.

“Jesse?” Anakin exclaimed.

For a long few moments there was nothing but more static, yet Anakin’s heart was beginning to race again.

Then…

“… – Anakin – …”

Anakin’s breath caught.

_That voice._

“Obi-Wan?” Anakin breathed into the comm. “Obi-Wan, is that you – are you all right?!”

The reply was barely audible – only a few words stood out amongst the static, but they were spoken in Obi-Wan’s voice, beyond any doubt of Anakin’s.

“… find… fortress… in… lo… d… awa…”

There were a few more unrecognisable parts of words, nothing Anakin could make out. He tried to adjust the communicator’s frequency but to no avail, and Anakin cried out into the receiver,

“Obi-Wan!?”

“… Anakin…”

The static stopped.

Anakin stood on the shore of the lake, breathing heavily.

_Fortress. Obi-Wan definitely said ‘fortress’. Maybe he’s still alive after all, then._

He _knew_ how insane it sounded, but that couldn’t have been anyone else’s voice. Anakin brought up the map of Silent Hill again and zoomed out as far as he could go.

_North side of the lake_. Before, the map hadn’t allowed him to scroll north, but when he tried again now he found that the north shore was visible, and dominated by an enormous square block of black – a building, labelled:

FORTRESS

There. There was where he needed to go. Anakin glanced over the rest of the outer shore of the lake – there was a road he could take northwest that would circle back around, but the boundary went out so far that the road was more than twenty miles long.

Cutting across the water was about three. Anakin’s eyes fell on the small boat waiting at the little dock. It was basic, using only oars as propulsion and lacking so much as a compass as far as instruments went.

“Right,” he muttered.

There was nothing else for it. If Obi-Wan was at the Fortress, he wasn’t going to run all the way around the edge of the lake for an extra day before he got to him.

He ran down to the dock and began untying the rope that was holding the boat in place.

Then he paused. There was no name on the tiny, one-man vessel, but there was a message carved messily onto the wood of the hull:

**worse things happen at sea**

Anakin’s eyes narrowed, and then he kept untying the rope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... and that wraps up the Research Station section. Now, onto the final section of the game... Fortress!
> 
> (In Silent Hill 2 the final section of the game is the Hotel. But I guess Phanti and Zeall didn't have as much of a reliance on tourism, because they never built one. Indeed, from the looks of it they didn't build a Sith amusement park either...)


	19. Fortress

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, my most excellent good friends! Thanks for dropping by!
> 
> In this chapter, Anakin row, row, rows his boat, gently across the lake, has a few dream/flashback sequences, visits the Silent Hill Sith Fortress and is invited to a very exclusive birthday party...
> 
> Hope you all enjoy this chapter, and please do leave me a comment if you feel anything in the story merits it!
> 
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

In all honesty, boating was not one of Anakin’s strong suits. Particularly without the Force to help him. But concentrating on not capsizing his craft at least gave him something to focus on other than the fact that everything was making less and less sense the further he followed the path whatever power was in this place had set out for him.

Because if he had stopped to think about it, he would have realised how stupid it was to follow Obi-Wan’s voice straight into the inner sanctum of a Sith inner sanctum, when all evidence pointed to Obi-Wan being dead. The message had been so choppy it would have been literal child’s play to fake with a few clips of Obi-Wan’s voice – and there were many ways one could have obtained such clips.

And yet, Maul’s words were ringing loudly in his ears.

_“Exactly!”_

Silent Hill didn’t make sense. But the idea that someone pieced together a fake message from simple audio clips, did. Yet he was still in Silent Hill, was he not?

So Anakin rowed on, out onto the open water.

A few fumbles and he was at least able to move himself consistently forward, remembering the few lessons in survival training that had covered this kind of makeshift craft. There was a moment he found himself at a loss – the fog swallowed up the south shore completely about thirty metres out, and he was left in an endless, empty space.

However, rowing on for a few minutes with whatever determination he possessed, he saw something of the north shore much quicker than he would have expected. There was a red light, glowing weakly in the sky. He couldn’t tell how far away it was, but he could take the hint.

“Time to spring the trap…” he muttered to himself, and rowed for the light.

A while later it began to drizzle, and Anakin was left to muse on exactly how screwed he’d be if the weather took a turn for the worse and a storm started tossing him over the waves. It would have been hilarious if, after all those years roasting in the desert, he ended up drowning. Those years made it hard for him not to appreciate the extra water brought in by rainstorms.

Blizzards he could do without, after almost freezing before he had the chance to drown on Yrinst, but somewhere like Kamino… that had been his kind of planet.

They’d had a two-day respite after Grievous and Ventress had assaulted the cloning facilities that one time. The _look_ on Rex’s face when he’d told him he wanted to see Kamino from the outside once they’d finished mission reports – _just_ about holding himself back from a _‘Begging your pardon, sir, but are you actually kriffing stupid?_ ’ if Anakin had read his face right.

He wished Rex were here now.

No, that was a lie. He’d made sure not to wait for him or Ahsoka when they’d landed on Mandalore so that they wouldn’t be at more risk from Maul. After what that Sith had done to Qui-Gon he…

Who knew what would have happened to Rex by now if he’d been here? Although, given it was Rex, he’d probably have gotten the ship spaceworthy and left orbit back for Coruscant by now.

_You took Jesse instead_ , his mind said. _You took Jesse because you’re not as close, and didn’t think to check if he was all right first. This is why they tell you, ‘no attachments’._

Annoyance flared, even when it was himself repeating that old bit of Jedi dogma, and yet, after the conversation he’d just had with Jesse, could he really say he _hadn’t_ done the wrong thing because of attachments?

_Just add it to the long list of your ‘wrongs’, I suppose._

He’d veered off course a little when he next looked behind himself to check – a few degrees too far east. But the red light was still visible, more or less depending on how thick the fog drifting between it and Anakin was. At its thinnest, and if he squinted, Anakin almost thought he could see a shape to the light, like being able to see the circle of the sun through cloud.

This light… he was pretty sure it was triangular.

Anakin kept rowing towards it, letting his thoughts drift.

*~*~*~*

_“Sir… are you_ sure _?”_

_Rex gave him the old ‘you’re going to get yourself and possibly me killed, sir’ look, and Anakin – as usual – laughed it off._

_“What, you don’t feel like some fresh air, Rex?”_

_“There’s more fresh water in the sky than air right now, sir,” said Jesse, grinning up at them from his sabacc game with their two newest Arc Troopers._

_Anakin grinned back. “All the better.”_

_Feeling Rex’s tension increase to higher levels than they had during yesterday’s battle, Anakin turned back and clapped him on the shoulder-guard._

_“Don’t worry, Rex, I’ll be careful.”_

_He was met with a look of exasperated doubt from his captain, one he just wasn’t quite able to school, as he replied, “Sir, the dangers of the wet surfaces alone in a storm like this – “_

_Anakin cut him off with a laugh._

_“That would be a great scoop for the holo-reels. Anakin Skywalker: Jedi Knight, General of the 501 st Legion and Hero with No Fear – killed by a puddle. Let’s go, Rex!”_

_If he’d had to describe the noise Rex made then it would have been the static that was left on a long-distance comm that had been hastily jammed to prevent too many obscene curse words from reaching the other end of the call._

_But Anakin just headed for the door, throwing over his shoulder – “Oh, don’t tell Obi-Wan, guys.”_

_“Course not, sir,” said Hardcase, not even looking up from his data pad._

_After, Anakin had a distinct sensation that Rex had mimed behind his back for one of the others to tell Obi-Wan as soon as possible – or worse,_ Kix _– but Anakin had to admit he didn’t actually mind that. He liked to see just how loud he could get Obi-Wan to raise his voice at him once and a while._

_… best not to read too much into that, probably._

_Outside, on the city’s walkways, Kamino was at its best._

_Water was everywhere; cascading from oceanic dark clouds above them, and the Force ebbed and flowed like a sea of its own in the onslaught of rain the strong winds threw against them. Anakin was drenched in moments, not bothering to have donned anything waterproof – he doubted anything less than an airtight suit was proof against the rains of Kamino – and spread his arms out wide to catch as much of the water as he could, laughing._

_“This is great!” he cried._

_Like a tumultuous drum, a crack of thunder above drowned him out for a few seconds. He hadn’t been expecting it, his heart jumped and it made him laugh more._

_“Sir, I really don’t think we should be out here in this weather!” called Rex._

_“What!? Don’t tell me you’re scared, Rex!”_

_Rex rolled his eyes, a seemingly blurry gesture to Anakin, viewing it through the water pouring over his face._

_“No, sir – but I can’t say getting hypothermia is my idea of fun.”_

_“It’s not?” Anakin yelled back, with false surprise._

_In the Force, the sensation of a huge pulse was approaching – not of anything living, but of another kind of energy, and Anakin recognised it. He jogged out further into the open – a landing pad, and glanced over the various lights at the top of their tall towers, choosing at random._

_“Watch this!” he shouted, pointing towards his target. “I bet you I can make that tower there!”_

_“Sir!?”_

_Grinning at the perplexed look on his captain’s face, Anakin threw his arms out again and concentrated, willing the tendrils of the Force to wrap around him, move him, give an extra burst of power to his muscles at just the right moment…_

_The violent gale slammed into him, and he leapt up._

_Too far and too fast to hear whatever Rex yelled after him he flew into the storm, through curtains of vivid cold water, over paths and structures, on the lift of the screaming wind. No pod, no fighter, no vehicle but the wind itself – he_ flew.

_They were at just that sweet spot in the weather of having a wind strong enough, but not too strong._

_Not too strong for Anakin, anyway. With nothing but the Force on his mind, he let himself be carried away into the storm, flying, flying, flying… past a thunderous crescendo above him…_

_And for once…_

_… for a moment…_

_… for once, there really was peace._

_The tower loomed, and he had to refocus from flight to landing – not his strong suit, but without much else to worry about he managed to grab on to a rail placed upon the point of the obelisk for maintenance – it had a flashing light at the top. He didn’t make it over the rail, but it was a simple enough task for a Jedi to swing himself up and over on to the narrow boards. Simple enough not to get knocked over the edge by the next gust of wind too, and he opened his comm-link to Rex and yelled –_

_“Hey, how about that!?”_

_“Sir! Are you all right!?”_

_“I’m great!”_

_His heart was leaping about in his chest and he couldn’t help laughing louder, gazing out at the storm and the sea, and down at the platform where Rex was standing. He could just about make out a blue-white dot down below._

_“Sir… I_ really _don’t think this is a good idea!”_

_Because Rex sounded actually disturbed, Anakin paused for a moment._

_“You want me to come back, Rex?”_

_“Wait a moment now, sir – “_

_“Okay – here I come!”_

_Anakin could feel it easily in the Force – another current that could take him back down to where he’d started if he let go enough to become a part of it. He hopped up onto the rail, balanced in an ebb of the tempest, then jumped off as the wind came to carry him._

_And he was flying: over the lights of the city in a never-ending deluge of cool, clear water. He knew the others didn’t understand, he wouldn’t have expected them to – but far from being any kind of Chosen One – this was what he felt he should have been. If he could have transformed himself to one of those diving ocean-birds, that had no purpose but to avoid the lightning…_

_The lightning._

_Out of the corner of his rain-obscured eyes he saw the snake of it across the ash-grey sky. And something about that lightning…_

_Rain and thunder he could wrap around himself like a blanket, but the lightning was like an omen somehow._

_And that small distraction pushed him just a touch off-course._

_He came back down to the landing pad, facing out towards the waves and skimming too close to the edge where the earlier battle had destroyed the safety rail._

_The sea below loomed, and his heart leapt up, trembling –_

I’m going to fall.

_…_

_… and then a familiar rope in the Force coiled around him and pulled him from the ledge, yanking him roughly into Obi-Wan’s arms._

_His heart was still thrumming away, as he looked up into those stormy blue eyes, as intense as he’d ever seen them._

_“Hi, Master.”_

_He saw the storm quickly fade to calmer waters – inside Obi-Wan, if not the one bombarding the city. His master took a deep breath, and Anakin knew he was releasing a hurricane into the Force._

_Despite all the years since Yrinst; how he wanted to kiss that face in that moment._

_How he wished he had…_

_(“See,” Fives called over the rain, clapping Echo on the shoulder. “I told you he’d pull through – the General always does!”)_

_“Anakin?”_

_Stirring, in an uncomfortably large chair –_

_“Anakin, are you all right?”_

_He blinked, and the blur in front of him came back into focus as Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, in an identical high, ornate and uncomfortable chair. There was a twinkle in his light blue eyes, and an amused smile on his face. But Anakin was not set at ease, because…_

_Kriff it! He’d fallen asleep in front of the Chancellor of the Galactic Republic!_

_“I – I’m so sorry, Chancellor!” he stammered. “I – “_

_Palpatine chuckled. “It’s quite all right, Anakin, you were only away for a few moments. Though I see Master Windu and I have something in common after all.”_

Oh, kriff _. Anakin felt his face heat right up._

_“No, Chancellor!” he cried. “You’re not boring at all! I mean – neither is Master Windu, of course – “_

Stupid, stupid, stupid…

_“ – but I was just…”_

_“Anakin,” said Palpatine gently. “You’ve had quite the long day, I think, my dear boy. I’ve heard about the training regime the Jedi put their young through as well: very rigorous indeed. You are to be commended for all you have undertaken, and at such a young age.”_

_Anakin’s face was only getting redder._

_“Well,” he mumbled, “all the other Padawans go through it too.”_

_“And they are also to be commended,” said Palpatine, finishing the last of his wine glass. Anakin’s was empty already. “However, you’ll correct me if I’m wrong in saying it, but I believe the Jedi have different expectations when it comes to you. I’m a politician, Anakin – sad but true – I do pick upon these things. I believe they sense a great potential in you.”_

_He smiled again, fondly._

_“As do I. Not that my senses are anywhere near as attuned as a Jedi’s,” he added, humorously._

_“I think your instincts are probably pretty good even without the Force, Chancellor,” Anakin replied. His heart was beginning to settle now, as he became more at ease with the situation._

_“Coming from a Jedi, I take that as the highest of compliments,” said Palpatine – without the smile, so Anakin knew he was very serious about it, and felt compelled to sit up straighter._

_There was a brief pause then, a moment of reflection for Anakin, where he felt like he was finally beginning to understand what the Chancellor saw in him, and understand on a higher level what the Republic saw in the Chancellor, that had seen him to this position._

_And it was a good feeling – a moment of growth, he thought. He felt fortunate to be in this privileged position, especially thinking about where he’d started, and in that moment it boosted his confidence – in himself, and in the Republic as a whole._

_Or at least, in its_ current _leadership._

_“And speaking of Jedi,” Palpatine continued in a lighter tone, as he glanced at a nearby terminal “It seems your Master Kenobi has arrived downstairs. Goodness me, is that the time? We should be getting ready to send you back.”_

_“Already?” asked Anakin, with surprise. He glanced out the window at the cars in the distance zipping past an orange sky and quickly dusted himself off so Obi-Wan wouldn’t guess at the faux pas he’d made._

_“Time flies in good company,” said Palpatine cheerfully. “And I hope you’ll also have acquired some good material for your essay. We were lucky it coincided with my visit to the Office of Child Protection Services.”_

_“Mm,” said Anakin, glad he’d decided to switch topics in order to take advantage of the outing. And that reminded him, “Thank you so much for taking me, Supreme Chancellor.”_

_Maybe the shortfalls in the system were something the Jedi could look into?_

_“It was my pleasure,” Palpatine assured him, reaching out to clap him on the shoulder._

_He guided him towards the door to his office just as the chime sounded. Anakin could already sense that it was Obi-Wan on the other side, and began preparing how best to show him how well he was now going to do on his essay on Republic institutions, and how well he’d represented the Jedi Order today._

_There was a little thread of anxiety within him, though. He wasn’t sure why._

_He brushed it off._

_Security announced Obi-Wan’s presence and Palpatine opened the door with a brief command. The young knight entered with a short bow to the Chancellor, and a knowing smile for Anakin, who was relieved to see him after the day they’d spent apart. He rarely had so much time away from his Master in one go, and when he did the experience was usually not… well, not the kind he’d hope for._

_Today had been a rare exception now that he thought about it, and maybe that was what made him uneasy. He didn’t know how Obi-Wan would react to him enjoying learning from someone else so much. Someone who wasn’t a Jedi._

_“Master Kenobi,” Palpatine greeted, “you have impeccable timing.”_

_“Supreme Chancellor,” replied Obi-Wan, smoothly. “I hope Anakin has been behaving himself. I know he understands just how rare this sort of opportunity is.”_

_Anakin knew Obi-Wan was only being half serious, and rolled his eyes. But Palpatine answered quite seriously –_

_“Ah, but not so rare as the one given me, Master Jedi. It is a powerful thing indeed, when a boy the Republic failed to protect puts himself on the line to protect that same Republic. I shall never forget, my boy, how you swooped in like an avenging angel at my home planet’s hour of need.”_

_With his eyes, he let Anakin know how much he meant what he said. Anakin could feel it in the Force._

_“Perhaps from your perspective, Chancellor,” said Obi-Wan diplomatically. “But vengeance is not the Jedi way.”_

_“Well,” said Anakin, drawing a sharp look from Obi-Wan. He hesitated briefly, but then pushed on. “At the time I just wanted to help Padme.”_

_“Indeed,” chuckled Palpatine. “I’m sure you did. Now, it’s been a long day for a growing boy, and I’m sure Master Kenobi wishes to get you back to the Temple before dark.”_

_“As you say, Chancellor,” said Obi-Wan. He smiled at Anakin, his blue eyes soft and kind. “Everything all right, Anakin?”_

_“Mm-hmm,” said Anakin._

_He wasn’t lying._

_He didn’t think the strange dream he’d had was worth mentioning._

_“Then you_ are _lost!”_

_In his mind it all happened again, the same way it always had. Just as he’d cleared the last of the sand out of the converter and dumped in in the bucket with the dead womprat babies, there was a yell from outside the door. He heard the dull smack of someone being punched and falling into the wall, and a lady crying out in fear._

_He raced behind the generator with his toolbox and hid, just as the door was opened, and Nini was thrown inside against the machinery by a female zabrak, who hissed, “Shut the door!” over her shoulder._

_As Anakin’s heart began to race her companion, a dark-skinned human male with a mohawk of long braids in a ponytail, followed her in, casually pressing the door release button._

_The zabrak grabbed Nini by the neck, crowding her into the generator while the man stood guard. A vibroblade slipped out from beneath her sleeve and was held up at Nini’s throat._

_“I know you,” the zabrak spat. “You’re the tart who passes the little presents under the counter on Madame’s orders. You have our fucking twigs, you bitch – where’ve you stashed them? Up your arse? Wouldn’t have thought they’d be safe there at all!”_

_She laughed._

_“… but I can get my friend over there to check.”_

_Anakin crept back slowly, so they wouldn’t hear him, searching as silently and quickly as he could for the best tool in his kit to use as a weapon. Even though he_ was _afraid, this didn’t seem overly terrifying to him._

_It was more of an ‘ordinary’ kind of frightening. He settled on the multi-purpose hand-drill._

_“Please,” Nini whimpered, shaking her head. “Please, I don’t have anything on me here. Let me go to Ringa for the death sticks and I’ll – “_

_“You’ll what? Have a dozen of her goons mosey on down and vaporise us? I think I’ll send my esteemed colleague up with your little finger in a baggie and see if we don’t get our fucking cut from Ringa in exchange for the rest of you.”_

_Anakin crawled back to the edge of the generator. For some reason, there was a moment he thought might be safer than those preceding it to look, and when he followed that instinct he was relieved to find both the zabrak and her companion were focused on Nini. They didn’t see him._

_But he knew he’d have to act fast, before they hurt her._

_“No, please – I can get you death sticks – “_

_The zabrak slapped her head against the generator and snarled, “Shut it. We’re going out the back before one of those perverts in there decides to start snitching upstairs in exchange for an extra hour with the nipple clamps – “_

_“Leave her alone!”_

_Spurred on by the zabrak’s assertion that they were going to take Nini now, Anakin rushed out from his hiding place with his finger on the power button for the drill, extending the energy bit and running at the man, who he assumed was the bigger threat._

_He assumed wrong. Though the man was much bigger, he hadn’t known at the time that a baseline zabrak of either sex was both faster and stronger than a baseline human male._

_With the element of surprise he managed to drive the bit into the man’s thigh – he yelled in pain and dropped the blaster he was holding – but the zabrak swiftly knocked Nini to the floor to stun her before grabbing Anakin by the scruff of his shirt quicker than he’d realised she’d moved._

_She got a hold of his wrist and jerked it painfully so that he let go of the drill, then stepped back and put one foot on Nini’s ribs while lifting Anakin into the air._

_“What’s this?” she spat. “Ringa delving into darker shit than I thought? Or did a customer leave one of your whore friends with a little present?”_

_Anakin tried to kick out at her but she threw him against the generator with enough force that the black of his head clunked against it, dizzying him._

_“Fucking brat,” the man choked out, hand on his thigh._

_“He’s a junk dealer’s slave – he’s there to fix the generator, please – he’s just a boy, he – “_

_The zabrak punched Anakin in the face, knocking his head back into the metal a second time. Pain exploded through the front of his head and blood ran down onto his lip._

_“No, no – you mustn’t! He’s not Palace property – !”_

_“Oh?” asked the zabrak. “Then I guess Ringa will have to pay his owner for the damages out of your tips.”_

_Anakin could hear himself making a pained sound, but he heard the zabrak’s words over that, though his vision was blurry. And then the man’s._

_“Oi. Give him here, Ko. I’ll show him what happens when you mess with – “_

_The door opened again as he was speaking – and the man was cut off when a blaster bolt hit him in the same leg. He screamed, and Anakin scrambled away from the noise. Nini crawled after him and put her hands on his shoulders, pushing him away from the chaos._

_A stranger walked into the room, casually kicking aside the blaster the man had dropped. Anakin couldn’t see them all that well – and even if he had he wouldn’t have recognised them. They wore a full suit of some kind, their face completely hidden. They were carrying something bulky on their back._

_The zabrak froze, brandishing only a blade against a warrior with a blaster on her._

_“Wyrren Ko?” asked the stranger. A man, from the sound of his voice._

_(was that voice… familiar, somehow?)_

_The zabrak spat on the sandy floor. “Who wants to know?”_

_“Hn. And that’ll be Mori Maddavan then.”_

_The man who’d been shot – and stabbed – groaned in pain, and the stranger must have taken that as a ‘yes’. He elaborated,_

_“Gardulla wants a word with you two.”_

_Even though he still couldn’t see right, Anakin had a feeling the zabrak went pale there._

_“Go on,” said the stranger. “Get.”_

_He must have said it to Nini, because suddenly Anakin was being pushed to his feet and herded to the door, as things started swimming into focus again. Out of the corner of his eye he saw another man – a human – knocked out and lying slumped over at the door, but Nini was soon pulling him along with an iron grip on his wrist, towards the stairs to the upper levels as fast as she could._

_A moment later, Anakin’s vision filled with red, and the shapes of moving bodies._

_Of course, only about half the ‘special’ patrons of The Palace had given a shit that the staff were being assaulted, and probably at least half of those only in that it was free entertainment. Most of them were just carrying on with what they were doing. The basement for the special clientele was a red and black room with dull purple lights. But it was more than light enough for Anakin to see._

_“Don’t look, don’t look!” Nini called out ahead, dragging him along._

_Anakin looked._

_“Let me show you – “_

_“The Force will be with you, always.”_

_“Good soldiers – “_

_“I’m here now. Waiting for you.”_

_“Anakin…”_

*~*~*~*

A small jolt startled Anakin, pulling him out of his dreams. Daydreams, rather – he wasn’t sure if he’d actually been asleep or not. Apparently he’d still been rowing, or the currents of the lake had been feeling kind, because the jolt had come from the little boat bumping against the wooden beam of a small pier on the north shore. Anakin rubbed his eyes quickly and reached out with one of the oars to pull himself in to dock.

_More weird dreams. Even when I’m awake now. At this rate, I’m not sure there’ll be a point in ever going back to sleep again._

He supposed the lake had reminded him of Kamino, though the clones and Kaminoans might have taken offence at the comparison.

Then that memory of The Palace again, that was what it had always been – though the stranger who’d saved them, he couldn’t have actually been… could he?

At any rate, it wasn’t the first time that ugly night had resurfaced in his memory when he was brought into contact with obscene things like what had been in that filthy basement… the brief images of ropes and crops, the one man gagging as he’d…

Mom had told him not to look at the bad things going on at The Palace. He should have done what she’d said. It was his own fault.

Aside from brief snatches of barely intelligible voices, the only other thing that stood out was that one day out with the Chancellor – and that made him anxious because…

He was probably over-thinking it, or under-thinking it. Missing the obvious. That day had probably been the point his relationship with Palpatine had really taken off, and all it was was his own mind trying to remind him of why he had to keep fighting through all this. Not necessarily for Palpatine personally, though that was definitely a big part of it (although… that thing with Dooku…) but for the Republic. The same thing Obi-Wan, and Padme, and all his men were fighting for.

_Right,_ he thought. _It’s a ‘keep going’ thing. Whether Obi-Wan is gone or not – and that’s what he would want. Now, where’ve you ended up, oh mighty Chosen One?_

Anakin held onto the pier and looked up at the red light.

The fog was not so thick on this side of the lake. Not thick enough to hide the massive structure that loomed not far away, nor its familiar shape. The map had shown only a black square, but the square was only the base for the tall, dark, glass pyramid that stood before him. The ‘Fortress’.

It was a Sith Temple.

And the tip was a blazing red light that shone out for miles around.

Anakin kept his eye on the huge entity as he disembarked, throwing the rope around the beam to tie it in place. There was no sound but the lapping of the waves at the shore, no static on his communicator and no sign of the experiments. There was a chance, he supposed, that the experiments were only found on the south side of the lake – but though at a glance it seemed clear enough over here, in his heart he doubted it.

Vader was definitely still out there. He needed to be prepared to face him. That meant not taking things for granted, and that put an unpleasant thought in his mind.

And it was a good thing he thought of it – that the red lightsaber felt far less heavy on his belt here than it had felt in the catacombs. When he pressed the on switch, the blade stuttered and died in seconds. So much for that.

But there was nothing else but to keep going forward. So, armed with a beat-up old blaster, a wrench and a non-functional lightsaber hilt, Anakin walked up the pier toward the shore and the enormous pyramid filled with who knew what kind of Sith madness.

_You’re an idiot, you know_ , he told himself. _If you could barely handle Silent Hill’s apartment block or med centre, what do you think is going to happen to you at Silent Hill’s Sith Temple?_

_Well,_ he told that inner voice in turn. _I’ve come this far, haven’t I?_

Anakin reached a strand of mostly mud shot through with shingle. The great pyramid was about the length of the Senate hall away, up a path of a surprising amount of green, behind a hedged garden.

The green was the largest splash of its colour Anakin had seen since his arrival, and though he wouldn’t have called it the most ‘vibrant’ of greens, the grounds looked neat and well-cared for. And that was strange in itself. While the image of Vader patrolling the hedgerow for unsightly outgrowths to clip back was an amusing one, overall it left him with a feeling of unease.

Someone had clearly been looking after this garden. If not Vader, then who? Vader was the only _person_ he’d seen who apparently dwelt within the town – Luke, Maul and Obi-Wan had all crashed here recently and anyone else he’d found evidence of had died or left ages ago.

No, wait – he had seen an old man, hadn’t he – when he’d first come to town?

Had _that_ been Luke’s father, maybe?

_Why was he hiding in a kriffing burger bar…?_

Whatever explanation there was, Anakin was distracted from finding it at that moment by the sculptures. There were a number of them in the garden, half-way between the fortress and the hedge, all in a long row. Statues of about fifteen or so on either side of him at even intervals; life-sized, made of stone. They were old and weathered, most of them without faces and half-covered in moss and lichen.

One stood out for him when he took note of a sheen of metal at its base. The statue was of a man who could have been anywhere between twenty and forty from the half of his face that hadn’t been burned through with a lightsaber strike. Half a smirk still remained on that face, and his clothing was ornate, but less like a king or emperor’s and more like an eminent scientist or scholar’s from a history book.

This was noteworthy to Anakin, because he could make out the first and half of the final character in the name inscribed on the metal plate that had caught his attention in the first place. ‘C’, and what he was pretty sure was an ‘N’. It wasn’t hard to figure out what the ones in between would have been.

_So you’re Darth Caden,_ he mused. _Wonder if your pal Oloré is here too…_

A few of the other statues were female, but only one was in as good a condition as that of Caden, and though there was a metal plate on this statue, there was nothing on that plate. Nor, from what Anakin could see, had there ever been.

But he didn’t think this was Oloré either. The statue was of a girl about Ahsoka’s age, or maybe younger – lying in a flower bed on a raised mound. The only one of all the statues that was lying down, though some of the others were kneeling. Her eyes were closed and her hands were folded over her chest, above her obviously pregnant belly.

As the one that had lasted the best of this bunch, with the most work put into it, Anakin deduced that this was Phanti’s daughter, mother of the Padawan who’d been taken from this planet by the knight, and Oloré’s best friend and Sith sister. Oloré hadn’t put up any statues of herself, but this girl had gotten one, and on the stone kerbing that surrounded the mound the faded but still legible instruction advised him:

**_Worship Her_ **

A sharp pain lanced through Anakin’s brow, and he stumbled away with his hand coming up to his forehead. For a moment it was like he could see an actual body there in stark colour, the fragrance of completely different flowers in the air – a flash to another time and place like an electric shock –

A reaction in the Force? Psychometry?

No, even if he had ever shown so much aptitude for it, he hadn’t actually touched the statue. That image had come from somewhere entirely different. Like a memory – but it had never happened.

His unease getting worse again, Anakin made himself brush it off and then refocused on the task at hand – getting into the Fortress. He didn’t examine any more of the statues on his way.

At long last Anakin stood in front of the high walls of the pyramid – taller by far than the apartment blocks in town, though hardly the equal of the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. What stood out about it, apart from the blazing crimson light at the top, was that the walls were made of something reflective – polished transpari-steel, probably. It made the structure look white in the fog, except at the bottom where Anakin could see a perfect mirror image of the garden behind him in the walls, and a perfect mirror image of his own, haunted countenance.

He remembered thinking how thin and tired he looked in the mirror all the way back in Q3 B2. Now he barely recognised himself. His eyes were very bloodshot, and there were black smears on his face and neck. He couldn’t see so much as a strand of gold in his filthy hair. If his clothes hadn’t already been black, he was sure they’d look far worse than they already did.

A stray thought made him snort at his appearance. He’d thought of the experiments as potential props for scary holo-films all this time, but now he wouldn’t have looked out of place as a demented ghost from such a film himself.

Somehow, he doubted Vader was going to be all that scared.

Anakin found the entrance to the fortress with relative ease. Although it wasn’t immediately distinguishable from the outside, it opened automatically as soon as he walked past it, which made the temple’s effectiveness as a fortress immediately suspect. This also filled him with unease, because he didn’t think Phanti or Zeall could have been that useless.

There was no light on inside the fortress; the light in the hall came from the outside, through the transparent wall. Anakin came into a large, spacious entrance hall with carpet and wall-mounted lamps in the shape of flowers – non-functioning, but setting his heartbeat faster with the uncanny feeling of it all. There was a lavish wooden reception desk with a dead terminal built in and layer of dust that suggested the place had been cleaned less than a standard month ago at most. Paintings, actual canvas paintings in elaborate wooden frames, of local landscapes, adorned the walls.

It was… homey. Far more so than much else he’d seen in Silent Hill, and in the Sith Temple of all places.

There were three doors in the entrance hall – one behind the desk on his right, one leading off on his left, and one directly in front of him. He tried the door on his right first – locked, and though it wouldn’t have looked out of place on the set of a pre-interstellar travel documentary, a quick bash at the lock with the wrench and he knew it was durasteel, mocked up to look like wood. No getting through there without a key then, and he could probably count on that for the rest of the fortress as well.

However, on the other side of the desk he found three things. First, a power pack compatible with his old blaster. Second, a data storage device with the label: **Arts & Crafts**

Third, a card, embellished with gold foil designs on one side, with the following words on the other:

**_Anakin Skywalker_ **

_… is cordially invited to attend the birthday celebrations of…_

**_Darth Vader_ **

_~ at the Silent Hill Fortress on Toluca Lake ~_

_Refreshments will be served in the Dining Hall_  
followed by a special presentation in the Lecture Theatre   
on the third floor

The text was mostly black, but both their names were in gold.

_Funny, Darth_ , thought Anakin bitterly. Then, more critically, _but it doesn’t sound like your kind of joke, somehow._

A large floorplan on the wall behind him revealed the location of both the Dining Hall on the first floor, and the Lecture Theatre on the third. Anakin copied it to his communicator before trying the other doors in the room.

The door on the left was also locked, but straight ahead led into a corridor of three more choices; right, left and forward – the longest, and most ornate looking of his options. The middle path was lit with many candles; actual, flame candles, and wood-lined alcoves built into the walls held small, old-fashioned little cabinets topped with delicate, sculpted vases filled with what he thought at first were real flowers. They were fakes really, made of glass, but incredibly detailed.

Between alcoves the walls of this hallway were painted with various scenes of people gathering, celebrating, fighting, among others; while the corridors going left or right were comparatively simple. Even without the map, it wouldn’t have been a big mystery as to where he was supposed to go.

_Another trap to spring._

Anakin walked up the middle corridor, toward a set of double-doors decorated with wrought iron. The doors were much taller than he was, ringed knockers at about his chest height, and they were heavy, but they weren’t locked.

On the other side of the doors was a vast, and richly decorated hall.

Apart from some of the chambers in the underground labyrinth, Anakin had not been inside such a huge man-made space since he’d got here – and in the oppressive darkness those chambers had not felt half as large. A lavish, scarlet carpet rolled out before him down the centre of the room towards a raised stage, upon which: three thrones. Two smaller, simple black stone chairs on either side of a large dip that had been masoned into an enormous growth of different coloured crystals, which spilled out over the stage, up the wall and spread out beneath the balcony of the floor above.

Between him and the stage were rows upon rows of long benches, a little like the chapel back in the med centre basement, but on a much grander scale. These had high backs, with various strange beasts carved into the ends. Next to the benches, supporting the balcony above, were about two dozen tall, white pillars, with life-sized sculpted figures of white, marble-like Sith protruding from the columns like the figureheads of a hundred demonic ships.

Anakin wasn’t surprised at their colour. These figures all leant out and then curved up in a strange, unnatural position with their arms close to their bodies, and he knew why they’d been shaped thus.

“The ‘Hunter’s Bend’,” Chancellor Palpatine had told him, gesturing to some of the museum’s other figures once he’d guessed Anakin had had his fill of the paper exhibition. “They’re carved from the dorsal spines of the Seeli-Seeli, so they have to follow the spine’s natural curve.”

“How big are the spines in real life?” Anakin had asked.

Palpatine had had a curious expression, peering at the bending figures of ancient queens.

“There aren’t any. The Seeli-Seeli were prized as one of the most spectacular and lucrative of quarries for the discerning hunter, and naturally were hunted to extinction centuries ago.”

Only the largest spike would have been big enough to cut all these Sith figures to scale. Every one of them represented another death of an extinct species.

But the most arresting feature of the room by far was at the far end, on either side of the giant growth of crystals running up the wall: two gigantic portraits, in golden frames.

The one on the left Anakin recognised at once. It was a copy of the family portrait he’d seen in one of the storage cupboards in an apartment of Q3 B2 – father, mother, son, daughter. This one was ten times the size of the first, easily, and had fared even worse than the water-damaged miniature. Fire, this time, had left its marks down the painting – mostly on the right side where the mother was almost completely burned away, and the little girl half there, half gone, stripes of paint between stripes of black ash.

On closer look Anakin realised this was in fact not an exact copy of the painting he’d seen earlier, though it contained the same figures. The little boy was once again the clearest of all his family, but because of that Anakin could now see that his expression was different: no longer happy and adoring – worried, frightened even. He was reaching up for his father with his right hand, but the fire damage had burned that part of him away.

As for the father, his face and everything above his shoulders had been obliterated – and again, not by accident. The first version of this painting had had his face ripped off the canvas, the board behind it stabbed with a sharp object over and over. This, much larger version had been slashed at repeatedly with a lightsaber, leaving nothing of that part of the picture and even obliterating sections of the frame.

Outside that corner of the frame, burned onto the wall, were the words:

**DIE**

**DIE**

**TRAITOR**

**HATE YOU**

**DIE DIE DIE**

Was this Zeall, in the painting? The girl might have been Oloré then, but Caden’s gifts had made clear he had a different father to Oloré, and beside which the boy in the painting looked nothing like the statue outside. So who was the boy?

On the other side of the vibrant coloured crystals, the second portrait was the same size, in the same type of frame, but with very different style and composition.

It showed three figures, standing beneath a sky glowing white with the strength of its sun. The style of the painting was much vaguer than the life-like detail on its partner – what was it called again? Impressionistic? He wouldn’t have been able to recognise anyone from it if they’d appeared before him anyway; the central figure – the only one of the three whose face was uncovered – had no discernible eyes for one thing.

She was a female human, heavily pregnant, but this time Anakin didn’t think she was supposed to be Phanti’s daughter. Difficult as it was to tell from this style, she looked like an adult to him, with dark hair and a blue-grey garment. Her attendants on either side wore black cloaks with obscuring hoods. On the woman’s left was a man who was probably human, the taller figure on her right was more difficult to say for certain, but Anakin was pretty sure they were both Sith.

Vader and Zeall? _No, Zeall died a thousand years ago, Vader couldn’t have known him._

Vader and ‘Sidious’?

The ‘What’s in the Box’ host _had_ grouped the two of them together. But why did Maul recognise ‘Sidious’, yet not Vader?

At any rate, they were just paintings. The final thing Anakin noted before he left this vast chamber for the Dining Hall that was marked clearly on his right, was that there were keypads set into the arms of the three thrones.

_Wonderful_ , he thought. _More stupid combinations to find._

From the look of it, there would be three four-digit numbers for him to gather. His only clue was that above each keypad there were simple pictograms of eyes engraved in the metal.

One on the left-hand throne.

Three on the right-hand throne.

Four on the large, crystal throne in the centre.

Anakin committed these to memory, and then went to the door to the dining hall. It opened for him without trouble, into a somewhat smaller but still vast floor, dotted with tables set with red satin and laid out with gold. Daylight-mimicking chandeliers at half-strength cast dull shadows over the room.

There was a figure in black waiting for him within.

*~*~*~*

The man in the dining hall turned, and smiled.

“Anakin! You made it!”

Anakin blinked.

“Luke?”

And Luke it was, insane though it might have seemed. Though he’d changed from grey into a simple black ensemble he seemed otherwise fine, no visible injuries, and more importantly perhaps he lacked the look Anakin had seen in the mirror on his way in, of someone who was sick in spirit.

But he had, evidently, been worried. The relief in his eyes was palpable, and he stormed towards Anakin while Anakin was still processing the fact that this kid had made it here too.

Except he wasn’t a ‘kid’, was he? He and Anakin were the same age. If there was anything that had changed, outside of mere apparel, it was that that was suddenly the feeling Anakin got when he looked at him.

Luke reached and wrapped his arms around him tightly. Anakin returned the embrace barely a moment later. With all the shit that had happened over the last few days it was hard for him to believe Luke had escaped the labyrinth without falling into Vader’s clutches – but not so much so that it was suspicious, only that he was afraid the other shoe might be about to drop.

Still, he allowed himself a moment to enjoy the feeling of another person being this happy to see him. Of companionship. Of closeness. No memory of a chiding Obi-Wan or other Jedi Master even came to remind him he shouldn’t feel this way. It was almost like Obi-Wan wouldn’t have minded it so much, somehow – this connection Anakin had to Luke.

How strange to think they’d only known each other for a few days.

“Luke…” he muttered softly.

Briefly, Luke embraced him tighter, then he let go and began to pull Anakin toward the table he’d been standing in front of.

“Here,” he said brightly, “I have something for you.”

Anakin recognised his lightsaber immediately, among various other items Luke had laid out there.

“My – “

“I have my own, now,” Luke told him, nodding towards a second hilt in the display. “Time you got yours back.”

Anakin reached out and trailed the tips of his right fingers over the metal lightly. He wanted to ask if Luke had had to use his lightsaber to get out of the labyrinth, if he’d found it useful, but what he found himself saying instead was:

“Luke… you’ve remembered something, haven’t you?”

It was the simplest explanation for the different aura he felt – not in the Force, still quiet to him, but in a more primal way – around Luke and the way he was carrying himself. His bright blue eyes were still like a clear sky, but they weren’t going as wide as they once had. The brows above them raised, then Luke glanced away.

There was a long pause.

“Something important?” Anakin asked. The air was tense and he didn’t want to make a wrong move. He wanted Luke, at least, to be here with him.

“… yeah,” said Luke, with a brief, sad smile, as if he knew what Anakin was thinking.

Feeling a tendril of panic flicker to life within him, Anakin offered –

“You can tell me later, if you think it can wait. When we’re safe.”

But that was stupid, and he was compelled to add:

“… but I suppose if it’s important, you should really tell me now.”

The Force was silent. But somehow, he was absolutely certain he didn’t want to hear what Luke had to say. Then Luke turned, taking one step towards the far side of the hall.

“It’s not that I think you shouldn’t know,” he said slowly. “I don’t think I should keep this from you.”

He looked back.

“… but I don’t think you’ll believe me, either. And I’m worried that if I say anything, it might make things worse.”

Anakin frowned. Thinking back over everything that had happened since he’d got here though, he could see how something might have happened that Luke would worry Anakin wouldn’t believe, so he started,

“I got a message from Obi-Wan.”

Luke looked interested, but not confused, despite Anakin having told him Obi-Wan was dead already, so Anakin continued.

“Over my communicator, telling me to come here. I was sure I’d seen Vader kill him, but then I saw him in the labyrinth after we split up. And then I thought he was dead again, and now I don’t know what’s happened to him – I just…”

“You really care about him, don’t you?”

It was odd – Luke sounded somehow relieved and glad, like it had a personal meaning for him and like he’d had reason to think otherwise.

He thought about Obi-Wan at the side of the lake earlier, wondering out loud if Anakin hated him. All the times he’d screamed and yelled at him. All the times he’d wanted to kiss him, but hadn’t, knowing he’d ruin everything if he did.

He felt his cheeks heat up.

Luke didn’t wait for him to reply, instead smiling and asking, “Did you get the invitation from Vader?”

He held up a card with the same golden designs on the back as on the one Anakin had found.

“Yeah,” he said. “Seems like it was an exclusive guest list, huh?”

“Mm, and the promised refreshments were a little disappointing.” He nodded to a long table at the back of the room.

The table had the same red cover as all the others, but nothing else on it outside of two crystal wine-glasses and a dark bottle. This suggested that Anakin and Luke were indeed the only guests invited to the ‘celebration’, but it also struck another chord, and Anakin found himself staring at the glasses without saying anything. There was nothing to say; they were just glasses. And yet…

“I won’t fight you for the privilege of being the first to drink from that bottle,” Luke joked, but as Anakin continued to stare silently he cocked his head and asked, with a little worry, “Anakin? Is everything all right?”

Anakin snapped out of it, rubbing his brow. “Yeah,” he said. “Just… strange dreams. That’s all.”

Luke looked down, almost guiltily. “I get it,” he said.

Putting the invitation face-down on the table, he picked the new lightsaber up and put it on his belt, then retrieved the other items he’d been inventorying. A blaster, rifle, bacta patches, ration bars, power cells, and an odd few things like keys and scraps of paper, until only the card was left – still face-down. Anakin couldn’t see the writing on the other side, but it made sense that it would have the same text as the card he’d picked up, bar the addressee.

The same way those gravestones in the sand-filled room in the labyrinth had all displayed who they had been put there for.

_Luke S…_

Anakin’s mouth moved before his mind caught up with it.

“Luke?”

On his way to the far door, Luke turned back, and waited for Anakin to continue.

“… Luke, what’s your last name?”

There was then what seemed like a long silence, and Luke smiled ruefully.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you what I’ve learned so far about this place.”

He stopped and turned back again at the door.

“You can leave that red lightsaber behind now, can’t you?” he asked hopefully.

Anakin thought about it for a moment, gazed into Luke’s clear, blue eyes, and put the red saber hilt on the table.

He didn’t turn the invitation over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's all for this week, guys! Please leave any birthday messages or wishes for Vader in the comments below, and I will see personally that they are passed on to the birthday boy! :D

**Author's Note:**

> ...
> 
> ...
> 
> ...
> 
> Will you go down?


End file.
